i told you, not all of them have touchscreens!

Exactly. They're the type of people who always shop at the same supermarket, where the tomatoes cost twice as much as anywhere else and have a glossy wax coating, are all the same, approved size, and are utterly free of any flavor. In fact, they don't even know how to cook, and don't know why they're buying tomatoes in the first place, except that the reanimated corpse of Steve Jobs told them to. They buy their precious, shiny iTomatoes and dutifully display them in the crispers of their iRefrigerators. Then a week later, they toss them out and go back to the iGroceryStore and buy the new, upgraded iTomato 5S, with even more shiny and even less flavor.

It is true that the default Windows/Linux hosts file cannot do wildcard matching. However there are some apps like Acrylic or angryhosts which may allow such wildcard functionality. These seem to be Windows only however. For Linux there may be other options like DNS Chef. I am not completely clear however whether DNS Chef would work for this.

Of course hosts file blocking lists like mvps and yoyo would have to be updated to support wildcards. I guess someone could write a simple program to wildcard every domain in those lists and then maybe the list maintainers could be convinced to maintain wildcard versions. I think this is the only way that this DNS based ad blocking can move forward.

Wladimir is taking his thank yous in cash from advertisers wanting in on his whitelist. His idea wasn't original. It just became the most popular version. He's a cunt who has betrayed his users.

Right. Until it autoupdates in a week and re-checks the box (for your convenience) and moves the option back to about:config or takes it away entirely. When a dev cannot be trusted he cannot be trusted. And Vlad definitely cannot be trusted.

The same thing except that it actually blocks ads by default. Even the ones from companies who have paid off the Vladimir The Whore to be whitelisted. How can he be trusted now? I wouldn't trust him.

With every release he will probably try to sneak something in that will allow certain ads to be displayed. Like uTorrent, I think Adblock Plus needs to be viewed as adware now. The developer is motivated by advertising money. He will find ways to sneak in the ads over time. It's always the same story in these cases.

Just a heads up in case you haven't heard adblock 'plus' is now essentially adware itself. Pretty pointless. What you want is adblock edge. It's just a fork that blocks all ads that it can, even from companies who have paid off the original dev who obviously cannot be trusted.

You know, very few people can claim to have actually met the guy that invented Get off my lawn!

From your constant insistence, over multiple comments, that under your proposed system nobody would "have" to work. I consider it a privilege to be able to work to provide for myself and my family, not a burden to be cast off at the first opportunity. My ideal world is one where everybody has the ability and opportunity to work for a living wage, not one where everybody gets free stuff.

As a matter of strict values, I share your vision of a world where nobody goes hungry or cold. But I strongly disagree with your path to getting there. You consider a world where nobody has to work as a utopia. My observation is just the opposite. If you take effort away from people, they tend to become entitled, lazy, selfish, and (ironically, with more leisure time) miserable. They may have enough to eat, but they lose so much of their humanity that they become less excellent as people. There is intrinsic value to hard work. In my experience, people who work hard (up to a certain limit) are happier. A society of bored people is one where crime is rampant and people are full of envy and strife (because nothing begets envy like a sense of entitlement). And that's not even to mention practical issues, like the inflation that dogs basic income economies.

My "utopia" is one where everybody works hard when they're working. When they're not working, ideally, they're building strong nuclear and extended families, raising children with a strong work ethic, and teaching them that when they are able, they should help those whose efforts have been less fruitful than their own. That help involves, for example, helping people through tough times, or giving them a lift while they do something to improve themselves like get an education or start a business. The end goal is always for everybody to get to a point where they can support themselves by their own efforts, so that nobody is dependent on government largess (as opposed to everybody). In fact, government hardly enters into it, except for providing some basic infrastructure and emergency services.

Perhaps that society is not possible in our present human condition, but it is an ideal I would sooner seek after than one where an over-powerful central government deals with poverty by subsidizing laziness.

Sex is a lot more comfortable on a soft, roomy bed. And I don't want my car to smell like bodily fluids. I'm going to spend the time reading.

I think you misunderstand the "Supreme" part of the "Supreme Court," and the legal doctrine of res judicata.

And you just disproved your thesis. The end result of a body that regulates a business sector is always that the regulators get in bed with the people they're supposedly regulating and work together to erect barriers to entry into their cozy little oligopoly. Throwing more money at them will not fix the problem.