It's better in the sense that it takes 10 seconds from start to finish.

If your goal is instead to block the ads completely, I still prefer to use AdBlock Pro and let them manage the block list, rather than clutter up my hosts file.

Yea, i use these entries, too. Sadly, it breaks some pages functionality.

I was shocked to see that, when you are on paypal.com and click to register a new account, it routes you through some dubious ad network. Scary shit.

Saw this behaviour on another rather large site the other day, can't recall the URL though.