You're not the only one who uses hosts files like this. When Flash ads first appeared on Slashdot, I started blocking servers that send Flash ads. (I'll never buy Splunk because it was the first thing I ever saw advertised in a Flash ad.) I've since switched to click-to-play plug-ins for that, but I have written a few thoughts on how to make hosts file parsing more efficient than it currently is.

Alex P. Kowalski (APK) has long been an advocate of using hosts files for DNS blacklisting and acceleration, and his tool for Windows aggregates multiple sources over a million lines long. It also looks up the IP addresses for commonly accessed sites and caches them locally. He claims that his tool is more efficient than DNS because the operating system's hosts file parser allegedly runs in kernel space (fewer context switches) and the most commonly accessed sites (good or bad) are at the top of the list.

But lately, Windows Defender has been reverting the hosts file so that malware can't use the hosts file to redirect Facebook and the major webmails and "steal" users' credentials that way. You have to opt out of hosts file protection if you want to continue using APKware.

Only via government edict, which the government has power to abridge or revoke.

How is this not public performance of the computer program?

I'm smelling joe job. If it were Monsanto, it'd be properly capitalized without a hyphen: "Roundup Ready beans".

Kola nut extract perhaps? At least that's where Coca-Cola got its caffeine in the early days.

Some persistent Slashdot users claim that if "devices that can run it" aren't already widely deployed, then the product inherently isn't "something people want". They use the example of a PC in the living room, which is currently an unprofitable niche because most people who want to play video games on a TV are allegedly better served by a PlayStation $digit, despite its lack of selection and lack of user-made game mods, as opposed to a full-size PC. If you disagree with this, I'd be interested in what you have to say.

Theoretically this has a solution: separate the model and view. Make your model in the portable language and a view for each platform in the platform's preferred language. Then it's just a recompile to hit each instruction set. But the problem comes when a platform requires a language not shared with other platforms, such as J2ME phones requiring 100% Pure Java, or Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live Indie Games requiring C#. (In theory it's verifiably type-safe CIL for the .NET CF, but in practice that means C#.) Second- through fourth-generation game consoles had it worse: one used a 6502 family CPU while the other used Z80 or 68000 or both, and C compilers for those architectures weren't quite up to speed yet.

But is there a good reason why these stringent requirements don't benefit the end user?

De facto it does. Every system I'm aware of that supports both POSIX and high-speed graphics supports OpenGL (or OpenGL ES).

Visual Basic is C# with a different syntax, and C# uses the same overall concepts and almost the same syntax as Java. So if Visual Basic causes brain damage, so does Java.