I'm gonna go on a bit of a tangent from the main topic here (shocking for Slashdot I'm sure).

    On the topic of ad blockers I'm curious as to just how the ad model works. On the one hand I know that clicking an ad generates a click-through which generates revenue.

    However, ad blocker or not I'm certain that I won't be clicking on ads because I'm not a good little consumer drone and really don't care about what's trying to be sold to me.

    I shop when I need something at which point research, not advertisements, point me to the best product and I then know exactly what I want.

    From the tone of website owners who dislike ad blockers it sounds as though the mere act of blocking ads from being shown damages the site's revenue. I'm presuming that people paying for ads or companies that serve ads track their distribution by the number of times an ad is loaded by a certain site or page.

    My question here is, if Adblock works by blocking the actual loading of the ad by the server thus denying revenue to a website why can't it be designed to load the ad but simply not display it? Would this not prevent websites from losing revenue to ad blockers?

    In the end, all I want is to not see annoying flashing, blinking, video animated crap in loud colors all over my screen when I'm trying to read. My goal is not to deny a site revenue. I don't imagine there are many people out to intentionally damage a site's revenue but they hate the way advertisements are presented.

    How would loading the ads but not displaying them hurt either A) the ability of Adblock to function or B) a site's revenue stream presuming people are like me and would never click an ad to begin with?

You want to talk about an organization that screws everything up? Let me tell you about this company I used to work for... How many people have stories like that?

  Corruption? Come on. No sane person can say private industry is free of corruption and mean it.

  Private industry is not intrinsically more efficient than government.

  The only operational difference between the two, as far as I'm concerned, is that government's mandate is to provide a service within the budget granted while private industry is tasked with providing a service in budget AND with a profit margin.

  The other differences are procedural and irrelevant since procedures can be changed with effort.