Pirating on consoles requires getting your console physically modified which costs money, voids the warranty and carries a high risk of getting your console permanently banned from online services.
When I helped my friend mod his xbox360, I told him about the warranty. He said that if he downloaded 10 or so (I don't remember the exact number) games he would have saved enough money for another xbox360. As for online services - pirated PC games also usually don't work online, not that it matters for single player games.
I reviewed this guy and his lifestream idea back in 2004 (http://www.natesimpson.com/blog/archives/2004/08/10/scopeware/) and ultimately found myself pretty unimpressed. I mean, the core ideas are interesting but so patent-encumbered that it will be a decade before they are touchable, and the man himself holds some pretty irritating/intolerant views (cited a few in that post) that left a bad impression on the whole. Sad then, sad now.
I don't use ad blockers, but I don't usually have javascript turned on and flash is not installed. If your ad doesn't work without scripting or flash, then your ad has usability problem, it is your ad that is inaccessible rather than me trying to cut your revenue.
Since when evolution guarantees an optimal anatomical structure?
Evolution is pretty good at finding local hilltops. It may have trouble figuring out it needs to get off this hill to reach a higher one over there. The short term advantage for whales, when they first went aquatic, was probably to reduce their hair. They've climbed that hill to nakedness and now they can't see their way to a skin covered in spider hair.
If the whale body is "good enough" to survive and reproduce under the environmental conditions whales tend to live in
This is a bad interpretation of Darwinism. Under natural conditions there were always some whales under stress and dying for one reason or another, otherwise the whale population would increase until there were. If better skin would have saved the dying whales then evolution would have selected for better skin. Which I'm sure it did, even if it didn't achieve perfect skin, what they have now is obviously better than the average artiodactyl's.
then why they should have evolved the same microscopic hairs that we see in spiders?
Good question. One answer is that I'm not sure what effect little hairs would have on whales. They're so big that they're obviously way into the high Reynolds number regime where pressure drag dominates over skin friction. In that environment it's not always intuitive what you want your skin to be like. Sometimes you want laminar flow, sometimes turbulent, etc..
The more likely answer is that whales have only been in the water for a few tens of millions of years, and they're big so that's probably only a few million generations. Before that their ancestors were using hair for very different purposes and when the whales went into the water evolution picked the low-hanging fruit by getting rid of their hair altogether. If evolution had looked ahead and thought, "I'll keep this and try to make it low-drag," they might be better off, but evolution doesn't look ahead or think.
Whales haven't come up with anything new and clever in the skin department but that's not hugely surprising. Give them time and perhaps they will but it probably won't be homologous to hair.
The problem with ads is that they present you with an "image" of how your life should be. Shiny hair, pearly white teeth, a six-pack and a blond girlfriend with huge boobs. A big house, an SUV, lawn and 2 kids. They present an image of what "success" should be like or what a "man" should be like.. or more than the others what a woman should do, wear and think. Humans naturally wish to emulate stuff they are constantly exposed to. The human brain, watching stuff every day in ads, start to think that "Hey, everybody is like that so I should be too". So naturally you become miserable when you cannot be like them.
There's those who say "Ads do not affect me", and to those I say "O'RLY?". Think again.
I have submitted many stores about ads to slashdot which have been rejected. One of them is the following:
Today, a day which will live in infamy, I have created a filter which blocks all e-mail messages sent from Hotmail and iPhone devices. The reason? I don't like to read ads in my messages. The filter also sends the following message as a reply:
"YOUR MESSAGE TO me@somedomain HAS NOT BEEN READ, IT HAS BEEN AUTOMATICALLY DELETED!
Thank you for contacting me. In my ongoing fight against ads/commercial messages I have decided to block all messages that contain ad-like content. This includes messages from:
If you wish to contact me please do so using a service that does not append ads or irrelevant information inside your e-mail message. I apologize for any inconvenience caused and I beg for your understanding."
With your bare hands?!?