On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:00:48 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>> AdBlock actualy prevent the ads from even starting to load. It's realy
>> a "Can't live without" addon.
> 
> I've never installed this or any similar system under the assumption
> that it is almost guaranteed not to work.

Which, of course, is why it's one of the (if not THE) most popular plugin 
for Firefox.  Surely it's popular precisely because it doesn't work at 
all, right? ;)

> Designing a mere algorithm which can determine, with 100% accuracy, the
> difference between vital content and useless advertising garbage looks
> almost intractably difficult. Thus, the result would almost certainly be
> a system which either fails to block the majority of ads, or blocks the
> majority of useful content. (Or possibly both, at the same time.)

It doesn't need to do 100% filtering - it certainly does well enough, 
though.  But you've decided it's "intractably difficult" so it's not 
worth bothering with, even though it's very popular and lots of people 
have great success with it.

Which planet are you on again? ;)

> In other news, I have yet to see a spam filter which actually filters
> out spam and nothing else. (Then again, I haven't searched extensively
> for one...)

None of them make that claim.  But by and large, spam filters do a pretty 
decent job.  The one on Google Mail, for example, *rarely* traps 
something that's not spam (I check it regularly and pull things out that 
shouldn't be, it's about 1 every 2-3 weeks for me on average).  Does it 
get it wrong occasionally?  Sure.  But a quick scan of subject lines (and 
tags - oddly, sometimes it tags messages according to my tag rules but 
still traps them as spam) can easily pick out the mistakes it makes.

Jim

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