Here's (roughly) how it works: advertisers bid in real time for ad space on sites. They use what they know about you to determine how much they want to bid for the ad you're about to see. If they want to advertise for some car dealership, people who have searched for cars are more likely to click on an ad for a car dealership, so the advertiser who wants to serve a car dealership ad will make a higher bid than the advertiser who is hocking gummi bears.

If you know enough about which user characteristics indicate that someone is more likely to spend money somewhere, then you can make a bot that has a profile similar to that type of user. If you in turn own the site which is hosting the ad space, page views on your site have an increased value, which translates to more revenue for you.

When the submitter is StartsWithABang, you can generally count on a shitty article with excessive exclamation points and a picture every paragraph or two. Almost always a fascinating topic, just can't stand the style.

Does that including hiding the body afterwards? Can you post your rates?

1. No, it's not click fraud or anything resembling click fraud.
2. This thing only matters if it becomes very popular. Otherwise it's background noise.
3. If it does become popular, it will probably have some kind of detectable signature to it and will get filtered out.

Advertisers really won't give a fuck about this.

2 out of 3 ain't bad. I'll give you tired and unpopular, but hell no on ineffective. Sure it's not the only way, but it is an incredibly effective way.

OOP is a style, not a language feature. Sure many languages make this easier to do, but writing OOP in C is certainly possible, as many of us can attest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Going out on a limb here, but I think he might have been joking about geek stereotypes rather than making a statement to be taken literally.

So you're part of the problem.... and unfortunately, so am I.

Alcoholism isn't getting drunk easily, it's not being able to control your intake.

The article argues that alcohol tolerance made more food sources available. If this food was scarce but beneficial, a genetic craving for it would provide an advantage. It only turns into alcoholism when the source is no longer scarce, which is a (evolutionarily speaking) recent thing.

Thought to myself, "That dude was in high school 20 years ago? Damn he's old."

Then I did the math for myself. Damn I'm old.

er me that much.

I'd like to know what percentage of people at Burning Man are offended by various women breastfeeding, and also how we can optimize the queues so that everyone can see it happen without waiting too long.

Is the shadow a permanent problem? Or will it potentially get back into the sunlight at some point as the comet reaches a different part of its orbit?

My layman's legal understanding is that it is to some degree binding. They can withdraw it at any point, but anyone who acted on that promise can't then be held liable for having done so. IANAL, etc, consult one of your own if you really need to know.