Note that I haven’t properly researched this. Now, all of a sudden, we have another continent as oil-thirsty as we are, on top of one of the biggest amount of reserves. Since now we suddenly have to pay fair prices, we’ll start off with a nice oil crisis. Driving cars will be so expensive that almost everyone resorts to walking or cycling. This in turn results in a great drop in productivity for us, since we relied on oil to get us where we needed to be. However, this is not the only problem. The population of Africa is reported to be approximately a billion at time of writing, and technological advances mean access to the internet for everyone. This would deplete the amount of IP addresses we have immediately. Without immediately moving to the new technology (IPv6, which would incur great costs) the internet would basically slow to a halt.

But, this all is on the subject of wants, things that are great to have but not absolutely necessary. But what about the basic necessities of life? According to the Pareto principle, 80% of the resources are shared amongst 20% of the people. Assuming Africa makes up most of the remaining 80%, we would need 4 times as much food as we use now, globally. This accounts for shelter as well. While population density in Africa is quite low at the moment, as prosperity increases population does as well. If the continent does modernise, we will need another continent at most to house the people.

In conclusion, the inequality on Earth is necessary. For as long as resources are finite, inequality will always exist.

In ancient history, natural selection had made those, who were most fit for survival survive, and therefore pass on their genes. This system had sustained us for centuries, eventually creating the human species we are today. However, somehow, somewhere, we started to civilize. What this meant was that humans gradually started to ‘equalize’, or at least regarded as equal. As medical science advanced, everyone could get the same level of health care, regardless of their capabilities. This is totally contrary to that which had propelled us so much further all those years ago.

An example of this can be found in the episode ‘Critical Care’ of Star Trek Voyager (7×05). Most of this episode played out in an alien hospital in which patients were treated based on their ‘treatment coefficient’, or TC. A TC is a number representing their value to society. For example, a woman leading the power plant which provides energy for half the planet was granted a very high TC. This in turn meant she would receive the utmost care available. However, if your TC was too low, you would hardly receive any proper care, since medicine which could save low TCs their lives, was instead used to prolong the valuable member’s life by a few years as a routine treatment.

I’m not at all implying that this would be a system that would work in our society. But it does already apply. Globalization is a great example of this. In the East, there’s a much bigger drive to compete and make money, which is quite difficult on the competitive market. However, a side-effect of this can also be seen. If we look at the greatest technological advances that have been introduced lately, where do they come from? Yes, it is true that in the West we still have this drive, but it is not as big as in the East, as we do not need to be innovative to earn enough money to provide for ourselves.

This touches on the inequality of the earth itself as well. A lot of people seem like they would love to see that the people in Africa would have equal wealth as we do. But what if this would somehow be realized? You could argue that we use much more resources than we could live with, but the truth is that even if everything was divided equally, there would be such huge amounts more we would need to produce, seeing as the Western world really will not settle for less. At the moment this equality would be established, every natural resource on earth would be depleted within years.

I suppose the whole point I’m making is that while we might think we’re so enlightened in our Western culture, but all we’re heading towards is stagnation due to the lack of true competition, and change..?

I really recommend you download all the rules first by clicking the button, because this speeds it up rapidly. This new version can be downloaded here and of course I still expect a lot of bug reports. This install will not auto-update, so keep watching my blog for new versions, which will probably happen a lot. A site can be removed from the disabled list on the options page.

A beta is coming up when I know I’ve implemented all the features I want. Seeing as I received a lot of responses, I’ll just make it an open beta. If you’d like to stay on the cutting edge though, I’d like to remind you that AdSweep is open-source and the source can be checked out at GitHub here.

Basically, it’s the same thing as what I announced a few days ago, only this is even easier. I also plan on making a normal one-page script for any Opera/Firefox users, this will take a bit longer though and I’m not sure I can cache…

Chrome’s extension system provides a few advantages. First of all, I have a background page, which is simply a web-page that runs in the background, once per extension. This means that instead of loading all the rules for all the sites included into memory, I can store them once per session. This reduces memory usage by a factor of the amount of tabs open. It also means that retrieving the rules is done in the background and no longer slows down loading the site itself. Another advantage is local storage. What this means is that when rules are downloaded, they can be stored in a cache in the browser, so I can retrieve the rules, store them in a cache and then serve them from the cache the next time they’re needed.

So the way it’s set up now is this. Whenever a page is loaded, a request is made to the background page. This page will serve the page the rules it has in cache, if available. Whenever a page receives rules, it applies them. However, also in the background, the rules are downloaded again, from my site, the cache is updated and the rules the site receive are too. But, in order not to have to visit all those sites, you can also decide to click a button on the options page to download all the rules into the cache, greatly speeding up ad retrieval.

As I’m not going to throw it out immediately without thorough testing, please leave a comment below if you’re interested in testing this idea.

Edit: Seeing as this is all probably quite confusing, I’ve made a flowchart which displays how AdSweep is going to work. It’s available here.

Why does AdSweep block YouTube videos?
It doesn’t. What happens is that AdSweep uses some code to remove ads from the YouTube player. Usually this works well, but occasionally something seems to go wrong in the script. Refreshing should fix the problem.

Why do you never answer my emails?
I get a lot of AdSweep emails daily. In an effort to preserve my sanity and my time, I usually won’t respond unless I need to ask something or need to provide feedback. I do read all the emails though, don’t worry.

I sent you an email about this website x days ago and it still shows ads/is broken. What gives?
Again, I read every email sent to me. However, updating a Chrome extension takes some time, and Chrome’s auto-update system can be quite quirky, so I try to pack as much into one update I can, adding features as well. I’m due for an update though, so expect it soon.

Add features? What features are you going to add?
I don’t have a definitive list, but I’m going to at least add a settings page, being able to whitelist pages and a button next to the address bar to disable AdSweep for that page. This can be used to fix broken pages, and to support a certain website who’s ads you don’t want to block.

More questions pending.

Since then, I have received a lot of feedback, with sites with unblocked ads and also sites which it breaks. I am currently working on updating them all and hoping I can release near January. However, seeing as this is the holiday season, I can’t make any guarentees. I’m planning to incorporate a button next to Chrome’s address bar which would disable AdSweep for that website on your computer, as a hotfix.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to discuss something else. AdSweep’s home gets about 2 000 visitors daily. This also means the extension is downloaded a lot, which costs bandwidth. I’m fine with that, but it does bring bills I need to pay and as a student, I don’t have too much money to spare. So while I can understand not a lot of people have the cash, if you do, please donate any amount you feel you can spare. It will help me make the time to work on AdSweep.

Since this does feel like a ‘post because I need content’-post, I’m going to stop here. Have a look around my (still empty) website if you feel so inclined, and see you soon.