The conditions species live in aren't constant. Advantages of A and/or B fluctuate over time. If an animal has A, and the environment suddenly favors B, those closer to B win. For a while some animals will have both.

However, every feature comes at an energy cost, so animals quickly let what they don't need atrophy. If in the current environment B beats out A+B minus extra energy to generate both, then they will settle at B only.

At any rate, every organism is a mixture of thousands of features, from A0 to Z99999, many of which get added and deleted all the time, so your whole argument is bogus to begin with.

Look at today's flying squirrels. It's not hard to figure out how you get from walking mammals to this species, nor from flying squirrels to fully winged creatures. Why would it be any harder for insects to follow the same path?

It's not random. The ability for adult insects to fly evolved gradually. That has nothing to do with the fact that insects go through metamorphosis, which most likely evolved independently and prior to the capability of flight

Your argument makes as much sense as saying: "I don't believe evolution because people can talk using air even though they spend 9 months sealed up in a bag of water."

Fine. As well they should.

They advertiser can work this out with the website the same way I would have worked it out with the Miami Herald in 1955. Frankly, I'm not sure if that was trusting the newspaper's ad sales department to be not fraudulent when reporting circulation numbers, or if there was an industry group like Nielsen that verified such things or made estimates based on 3rd party polling.

Whatever the method, plenty of ad sales were made, and everyone was happy, and I know it didn't involve 100% tracking of individual readers. Alexa can either adjust the model that they have to account for the growing number of people who block their web bugs, come up with a new process or model entirely, or die in a fire. I don't particularly care. Life went on before all of this big brother tracking shit, and it will go on after it is defeated, or at least marginalized.

No question that it does present a risk, and it's fair to discuss how to mitigate that.

I propose that they can go about it the same way they do in the newspaper industry, it would be fraud for the New York Times or my local free newspaper claim a larger circulation than they really have when negotiate ad sales. I see why no reason why websites wouldn't have to present Alexa type statistics to back up their claim.

Taking out ads on some sketchy Eastern European hosted link farm should be viewed just as skeptically as calling up a Bulgarian local paper and trusting their staff to give you accurate circulation statistics and demographics about their village. i.e don't be xenophobic about it, but realize that there might be some incentive to take advantage of your ad money, and negotiate according to your risk tolerance level.

Download at your own risk indeed. I was curious so I opened a VM with a fresh IE install (no Adblocking) and chose the download.com link for VLC.

Download.com is reputable enough anyway, right? Long history with cnet serving up shareware and all that?

http://i.imgur.com/l8n2ScB.png

WHICH OF THE DAMN DOWNLOAD BUTTONS OPENS ACTUALLY GETS ME VLC?!?!

Obviously I know, but my dad doesn't, and that's why I have no sympathy for online advertisers.

They could just host the ads first party based on CPM statistics like a god damn newspaper, but then they would have to do actual work instead of plugging in some 3rd party malware laden ad engine.

I would have thought the crossover between people who used AdBlock and knew what the hell to do with a .torrent file would have been higher. I wonder how much money they made.

I recently found out (perhaps a bit naively) that there were ads on YouTube, too. It turns out I'd literally been using AdBlock Plus so long that it predated my ever using that site (or at least whenever they introduced ads). Turns out YouTube is a real shit experience when you use it as intended, as I found on my smartphone.

This will be surprising to you I'm sure, but it turns you actually *can't* walk outside in Buffalo, put a finger in the air, and say anything definitive about the weather in Tahiti or Dubai or Moscow or Los Angeles.

Pic related: http://i.imgur.com/lZ7C4nY.jpg

One o the best ways to stay comfortable is to not get your home destroyed by the crazy weather created by your cheap electricity rates.

Yes, it does matter.

Sell it to me then, jesus. I'll happily pay a yearly subscription to Gmail if they remove all ads and data mining and don't fuck with the interface too much.

I'm adblocking anyway but I'm sure they are still churning away at my data.

Would you care to enlighten us with an example of a popular real-world language that has not had problems with backwards compatiblity?

I can maybe see the life evolving in one of these solar systems after it leaves the black hole area, presuming the atmospheres of planets aren't scoured away by high-speed interactions with the interstellar medium.

However, how could this life "spread"? I don't see how you slow down any complex molecules from these speeds without totally incinerating them.

Genuinely asking: Not having tried either of these services, how did they solve the problem of vetting the drivers so the public is safe?