Illegal Government: Policy Laundering.

['Hiding responsibility for a policy or decision

One common method for policy laundering is the use of international treaties which are formulated in secrecy. Afterwards it is not possible to find out who opted for which part of the treaty. Each Person can claim that it was not them who demanded a certain paragraph but that they had to agree to the overall "compromise".
Examples that could be considered as "policy laundering" are the WTO Treaties,[citation needed] WIPO,[2][3] the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA),[4] or the failed Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe.[citation needed]']
- Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Laundering, retrieved 12-10-2010 2:47PM

The act of concealing the methods, motives, and causes of Governance is De facto FRAUD against the people of that government. In criminal court, the attempt to conceal a crime is evidence prima facie of intent to commit a crime and the knowledge that it is wrong.

The WTO meets behind closed doors with government leaders to set rules that are not voted upon by the peoples of those nations, to set rules agreed upon in secret, under terms that are not disclosed. This is Treason.

The lack of transparency in any process is universally due to the need to conceal the true nature of motives, beneficiaries, and consequences of the process. This is clearly illustrated under all US RICO and international anti-mafia laws. Hiding a thing that doesn't need to otherwise be hidden, such as a floor vote, or an opinion on a legal document, constitutes a crime in itself.

Thus, the WTO is both criminally negligent, and intentionally criminal by design.

However, I am not complaining just about the WTO. I'm complaining about the USA Congress, which also holds secret meetings, hidden votes, passes legislature written by corporations, and signs bills that the members have not read. It is en toto a mafia organisation.

Meet the new Mafia, not the cigar chewing italian suits you've come to imagine, but a hard-line, fascist, right-wing military industrial complex. Congressional votes can be had for as little as 5,000.00 US$. You want a Senators attention or a meeting? Offer to make a donation in person. These are known as handshake donations. The person offering the money gets to ask for whatever they want, which often results in a little rider on the next bill up for vote.

The United States of America is not for sale. It was sold in 1947 to the para-military chicken-hawks known as the Christian Right. They've made regular installments through the decades, and in return are guaranteed strong positions inside government that survive through President after President.

Right now the head of the FBI is an asshole who withholds evidence that shows the accused to not be guilty, in favor of politically-viable prosecutions.

The head of the RIAA? A newspaper executive who is also on the board of a dozen other corporations.

Who runs the Federal Reserve Board? A cosa nostrum of right-leaning fat bankers. Seriously, they're all fat as hell. They have to wear suits that are "extra wide."

Who chairs the Senate Committee for National Security? They make ALL the decisions that are rubber-stamped by the full Congress. What, about 11 people control the entire USA? Basically, yes. They can defy the President and even their own political parties.

You are not living in a Democracy. You are not living in a Democratic or Free world.

America: The Garrison State.

I don't always need to be the one speaking to deliver important news. I'll summarize and critique at the end of this very good list that orate far better than I.

http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/22/1/31.abstract
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/0/1/4/p60140_index.html
http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol4/iss2/art3/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/fallavollita2.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2715.shtml
http://www.counterpunch.org/wheeler11292010.html

Yahoo reports "59,400 results for the [search]: ["garrison state" america]
Google only turns up THREE. Yes, "3". As in, one more than two.

These top six links I've posted above cover in careful detail the reasoning, definitions, and problems with America now being controlled by the military. Without doctoring the data, over 52% of the USA budget is being spent on the War Machine.

However, despite 60+ years of building a formidable war machine, America is unable to:
Find Bin Laden
Finish Afghanistan
Stabilize Iraq
Find Peace in Palestine
Stop Israel from spying on America
Calm Iran
Increase Trade in the Middle East
Provide security or protection on the high seas [piracy!?]
Stop Somalia or any other tiny nation from threatening and killing Americans
Prevent, Stop, Win, Control, or even loosely guide ANY WAR.
Finally; There has been armed conflict every year since 1947!

The very concept of a "War Machine" America, or America "The Victor" is a complete denial of facts, logic, science, and reality.

In fact, what we have here are the exact same geopolitical and military structures that lead to the formation and successes of the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany. It's been documented that America smuggled hundreds of "SS" and "Nazi Party" members and officers into America, changed their names, and gave them jobs in the NSA, CIA, and Secret Service - an entity with a disturbingly familiar title: The "SS".

What did they do? They prospered in a government ripe for the plucking. America has always been a bit paranoid and a bit fragmented. The "Unifying" tactics of the Nazi party worked very well and continue to work exceedingly well today as their heirs run the United States with the same level of fascism, evil, and corruption as they did under Hitler's rule.

Forums still blow when it comes to support!

A simple google search illustrates the growing problem:

"launchpad unassigned ubuntu" [without quotes]

About 2,340,000 results (0.44 seconds)

That's over 2 MILLION distinct hits for UN-assigned bugs in Ubuntu, just through launchpad - a service that requires one to sign up to post bugs.

OBVIOUSLY, Ubuntu sucks when it comes to customer service and I'm less interested in ANY commercial offerings from this company Canonical. The only reason Ubuntu works is because it's based on DEBIAN which is rock stable.

The least fun you'll ever have is trying to google a solution to any Ubuntu problem. Just add "-forum" to the search string and you'll get a whole lot of nothing.

MSFT attempting lamely to acquire linux, still claims it sucks, but they're offering top dollar.

It's interesting and sickening that MSFT thinks it can own 235 patents on something that existed 20 years before the Microsoft corporation existed, and are unpatentable due to prexisting the software patent furor. Now that Novell has been stupid enough to try to partner with MSFT in an un-subtle trade, they're dying and being bought up by who?

MSFT. Who still will not own linux because it predates the entire DOS operating system by decades. Linux is based on Minux, which came from a free interpretation of Unix for small machines, which came from... you get the picture. It's funny to see MSFT make a bold attempt to grab ownership of free software after spending 25 years taking potshots at it and claiming it sucks.

Nobody knows hypocrisy the way that Microsoft does.

Letter to the Mayor of Seattle - already sent.

I don't think Seattle is doing enough to protect the people. I read in this article that only SOME of the police had automatic weapons. Why were some of the officers not properly armed? I also see that none of them wore armor, is this true? How can our civilian police force not be properly equipped with full military protection?

What are you doing going into an apartment without a tank? Why doesn't the SPD have tanks? Are your cars even armored? I don't see solid tires under them either. Why no body armor? Why no powered exoskeleton? SPD is looking fairly rural compared to modern civilian police forces like the Israeli Army and the Iranian National Guard.

So, you were afraid to enter an apartment where someone may have had legal marijuana? The only reason the SPD is afraid is because they are not properly equipped. And, what happened to firing tear gas and stun grenades into a suspected "drug den" first? What, are you guys liberal hippie babies now?

No armor, not enough manpower, no tanks, no grenades, it's no wonder that people with legally purchased drugs think they can get away with it in Seattle! SPD is woefully undergunned! That guy had a robe on, and his kitchen has knives! He might even be a registered gun owner, god forbid.

Why, with a legally purchased six-shot handgun, he could have potentially inflicted minor harm on one of the police officers before they gunned him down as they are obligated under the law. DO not permit resistance! Face to the floor the article reads... why was he not beat up? He should have had the fear of God put into him by the notoriously fierce SPD - who is seemingly growing timid. I can't see any bruising or abuse on this guy at all. Shameful behavior, letting someone talk back and refuse to immediately throw themselves on the ground get away without a trip to the hospital. All civilians should disrobe and prostrate themselves on the ground before the appearance of any officer of the law, just as a precaution. Nobody expects that when a civilian answers their door, that they should not immediately lay down when a police person kicks it in.

This scumbag hippie obviously needs to be taken out and killed to save the taxpayers money, but then SPD would have one less person to practice tactics on. We need more poor people for violent experimentation! Recruit all the people seen walking in Pioneer Square or on Hwy 99 into death camps for immediate training classes.

I think Seattle has become way too liberal. Nobody even shot him.

Diaspora = vaporware

Not alpha is an understatement. I'm going to ignore diaspora for at least a year and then I'll see if it even still exists. So far, it's a rails based nightmare of installation requirements conflicts, and the operators who claim to have it running WILL NOT say how they got theirs working. All installation instructions fail on requirements conflicts, and in two instances, the directions are flat out wrong.

Ruby/Rails is not very successful at all. In fact, statistically it's a recipe for failure. This site documents the "Top 50" rails sites, and note that all these sites basically suck.

http://storecrowd.com/blog/top-50-ruby-on-rails-websites/

Rails has its fans, probably people who don't really know how to use hard code, because rails is a scripting language not a programming language. It's like writing entire sites in javascript without any HTML or XML. Doomed to failure.

Sure, you can write games in Java, and you'd better keep them small because they'll be slow as hell. Sure, you can write web apps in Rails, but you'd better be a hell of a debugger or it won't do anything, and when it works it'll still be shit.

There are good reasons why most servers run Apache, why most programmers use C++, and so on. They work best. NEW does not equal BEST or even slightly better. Rails is a newer language, but it's got undeniable weaknesses, and I see it as most useful for programming advertising than making good websites that'll be robust.

If you can't write games in C++, don't bother. C#? Please, get a real language and call me in the morning. Any "language" that requires .net to work is crippled by default, and .net adds in all sorts of security holes. Again, people use C++ because it IS the BEST. There's no fanboi cheering here, it's simply put one of the strongest languages you can use for gaming.

Don't like it? Tough. Tell it to Quake, Blizzard, or anyone - so they can laugh at you. Real programmers use compiled code. Friends don't let friends script. Java won't be ready to replace C++ until processors can top 100Ghz or more, and are widespread. Even then, if it's not open sourced, I won't use it.

C++ has no secrets. The source is there. It remains the best compiler worldwide by popularity and security, by utility, by power, and almost any other metric I can think of. In fact, only by crafting specially designed metrics that favor Java or another language, can you even compare other languages to C++ and have them come out on top. In short, they shill.

Diaspora is doomed to suck. There are alternatives, however, and I'll be on the team that proves it. I've been down the PHP highway and seen the scripting insecurities and code failures. I've seen entire sites locked up due to a PHP error. I've seen unskilled hackers take them over. I'm done with that, with playing with broken toys.

What people need is a website that allows socializing, allows the user full control over themselves, and prevents hostile activity. That's really all people seem to want, and have yet to find.

You want to play stupid games like farmville? Go back to AOL. If you want to game, cough up a few bucks and play WoW or SC2 or Sims or whatever you like. Websites are still not up to that, mainly due to bandwidth and processor limitations. That's not going to change soon, and that's not the primary purpose of the 'nets. Gaming is too intensive even for most machines, and you sure don't want to try to play SC2 over a dialup connection. I've seen WoW lag on my FiOS connection.

People use the internet to communicate. It is a form of telecommunication, and is in fact using telco technology. That is its origin. Sure, you can game over the nets, but not very well. Internet use is designed for static pages and limited two-way data. You can stream one way, but not so well bidirectionally. Most people only have 1/10th the upload capacity of their download stream!

Now, this could change in the next few years, but more people will still use the internet for communications than intensive gaming. Even in WoW, the most common activity is standing there chatting. I've watched five teens play it in a gaming cafe, and over four hours of observation, they spent about half their time just talking. About a quarter of their time was spent running. The rest was game activity, fighting, leveling, building, etc.

HTML 5.0 has brought about some wonderful new possibilities, and Diaspora has made zero effort to utilize any of it. Facebook is too hateful, and with a tool like Zuckerfool running it, I doubt that people will ever be loyal to it. Myspace was the lead dog for a while, and look how fast everyone ditched it. Before that it was Livejournal. I went on LJ last week, and I hadn't been there in years. 25% of my contacts no longer existed, and half the rest hadn't been on LJ in 12 months or more. It's a ghost town.

Something new will come along that actually works better, and replace Facebook just as easily as it replaced Myspace. I have no worry about that, and it's just the waiting for it that bugs me. I've been ready to move on since before it got popular, because Z-man had the supreme idiocy to state publicly that he doesn't believe in privacy - even though he guards his privacy zealously. Do as I say, not as I do, Zuckertool?

The revelation that he probably stole the technology from friends only highlights how the media turns spoiled privileged people into celebrities overnight, while ignoring people who do more important work. Despite probable criminal origins, FB is constantly promoted in our corporate media. It's a game of who can be the best whore. I'm not interested.

I do hope that an open source solution evolves. I'd like to see a website that doesn't blow goats like Diaspora's does.

Shutting down my facebook...

I'm demopoly on facebook and I've posted there about the security problems and trials I've had with the company. I'm dissatisfied with many aspects, and find that even myspace has better protections than facebook does. Since I've succeeded in the act of installing Diaspora, I'll be working forthwith on moving ALL my personal information to that server, which I can fully control.

It's looking very likely that my last post on facebook will be the link to my diaspora server. I'll leave the profile there since it'll be awhile before Diaspora has the market share that facebook does, but given the power and utility of Diaspora, I can't see how it wouldn't spread like wildfire.

I'm certainly going to be doing my best to move people off of facebook, and I will provide hosting and training to people to enable them to do so.

On the impossibility of business, and what to expect.

Because America has an 'anyone can sue' legal system based upon privilege that originated in 1400s Scottish and British law, and has rarely been complimented, it's hazardous to be "in business." Everyone will sue you. Insurance to offset this is expensive. Despite my feelings about Corporations controlling most nations and the UN, USA, et al., those are the bad guys, and I'm talking about companies that aren't up to no good.

Google has to do things to be competitive, to obey laws, and to make money. They can't NOT do those three things or they will cease to be a corporation! Compete, Obey, and Profit are the paramount driving forces of corporations. Even in nations where they may freely flout certain laws, or be excluded from civilian law such as Blackwater / XE is, they still have the laws of other nations to be concerned with. However, laws are rarely a DIRECT problem, but the reputation of violating them can kill.

Profit is the golden rule, and a bad reputation will ruin profits. Once seen as an enemy of the state, or the people, a company will have a harder time competing against other companies. Thus, it eventually becomes enlightened self-interest to be "good." The less evil a company is know as, the more willingly people will spend. AOL almost has to trick people into using its services, and certainly spends a lot of energy in customer abuse in my opinion. Everyone laughs in even the largest rooms when I say "AOL" out loud. It doesn't even have to BE a joke that I'm telling! AOL itself is the joke to techies and geeks, nerds or all computer literate people, alike.

Don't be Blackwater, AT&T, or AOL. That's what Google means when they say "Don't be Evil." So, when I say most computer hosting is a scam, please understand that I am not really overstating the case. Today, a reputable, and trusted, host I still use failed to notice a domain being broken - EVEN after it took down their home page for 30 seconds. THEIR server reset, but they ignored MINE. It's still offline at this writing, nearly 24 hours later.

THAT is why I say that paying people to host your website is a gamble, at best. Even the most honest company can't really get it right. The problem is that they have to sell thousands of websites, and who can pay attention to thousands of things at one time? Nobody. They'll never hire that many people. You will notice, and that's why you should host yourself. The real problem is bandwidth.

I'm setting up the four home servers I have to be mirrors, so that they can run when the host I use for bandwidth fails to work properly - which happens more often than once a month. Even with a good hosting company and a business hosting account, there are monthly problems if you make any changes to your site, including just updating your blog.

I'd go 100% self-host if only I had more bandwidth at home. Guess what? Clearwire is upping their bandwidth to corporations. Soon... little jedi, soon. [Somewhat evil laugh.]

You see, in any business, no matter how bad the ESTABLISHED industry practices are, there will be competitors arise who will kick their ass. Clearwire will have my sword.

Expect to see me posting a LOT more about how to install, maintain, and manage servers in your home office, in the coming months. I've been down that road many times and still run several servers in my home now. IPV6 will also be my savior, as it has the potential to eliminate IPV4 problems such as home IP addresses not visible to the internet - when you want one or two of them to be.

Imaginary numbers. Math and the GOP are not in the same universe.

The infamous "Contract on America" once widely touted by the GOP was 90-something percent unfulfilled, and the reason for not meeting that goal is that there was no math in place. This new "Promise" on America is no different.

Lots and lots of fluff, lots of appealing promises, and no math. None. No economics, no numbers, only empty promises and hot air. I'm not really pro Democrat or anti Republican, because I dislike both parties, but when I vote I tend to go Democrat for one reason: They use math.

Obama may be hated or worse, but he uses math to solve problems. No empty promises that I can see, and very few of his campaign promises have failed to be addressed, even if incomplete. In politics, even 50% of promises kept is excellence.

The GOP stands at about 3% to 5% of promises kept since Reagan's Contract on America. A very poor record indeed. How can they promise trillions in tax cuts, and increase spending for business at the same time?

Unless they intend to bankrupt America, this Promise had best go unfilled!






Re:
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-gaggle/2010/09/22/gop-pledge-to-america-looks-unlikely-to-inspire.html?GT1=43002

I was going to install Diaspora... but no.

It's using Ruby, a fragmented, often-incompatible system that I've rarely gotten anything to install on. The lack of "installers" for ruby projects is frustrating. This one requires rubygems to be one version higher than I see available! Do they have some hotline to Moscow?

Conflicting package requirements is par for the course with Ruby. I've never even used Rails yet because of this. I've tried on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Another common problem is the lack of packages even being available on some systems. I've seen windows installs require a package that doesn't run on windows. The Hell?

Sometimes I think Ruby on Rails is just a massive prank. One day maybe I'll get it to work, but I've got other priorities. Life. Programs that work. Normal stuff.

The "Bud Commercial" viral post

LOTS of corporations have rallied rather ominously around the US Government following the overthrow of civilian rule...

I'm not disagreeing with Bud, or anyone who likes this... but the Saudi pilot who flew the Air Force owned plane was trained at a US cover operations base, and given his US pilots license by the FAA after being cleared by the CIA, and flew over anti-aircraft guns that'd been turned off. The regular air defense USAF jets had been directly sent to the midwest for that entire day and had no stand-ins. Sound like Afghanistan attacked us, or does it sound like US attacked us? Iraq never had anything to do with it at all! USNavy vet, top secret clearances, cold war. This is a textbook false flag operation.

"That looks like a demolition" - Dan Rather, Vietnam War veteran correspondent upon watching the twin towers fall.

For whatever reason, the US Government attacked the world trade center on 9/11. Demolitions staged the previous week by NSA services ejected girders into adjacent buildings - something a plane crash could never do, and melted steel at more than 2000 degrees remained in the ruins days later. No 747 could do that kind of damage. They are not fueled by THERMITE. You'd need to hit that kind of building with a shuttle launch rocket, or an atlas booster, to do that!

747s have hit that kind of building before, and they never fell. Buildings like WT1 and WT2 have caught fire before, more than 24 floors on fire, and never fell. Buildings like those that HAVE fallen, toppled over onto other buildings. NO building in the history of the planet has ever "freefall pancake" fallen into its own pad. ONLY those buildings that are BLOWN UP by controlled demolitions can freefall.

NEWS FLASH: The government LIES to you.
MORE NEWS: The newspapers and television are run by the government.
STILL MORE NEWS: Corporations SUPPORT the government.

Polygamy

This is one of few words in the Western world that has an automatic negative connotation affixed to it. Like many things in the West, this is wrong. Opponents in Western culture will point to a single instance of abuse, and make the entire genre illegal, simply because it offends their sensibilities. It doesn't matter that hardly any documented cases of abuse actually exist.

First, what is abuse? Christian opponents label the lifestyle itself as abusive. Feminists label the women's roles as abuse. Scientists? For years we've tried to reveal the truth, with typically limited success given the venom and hate directed at any person who dares to speak truthfully. Abuse is violence, psychological trauma, and physical damage. That's all. There is no damage from simply being different, ethnic, or non-Western.

Second, what is polygamy? What Western people know of it is limited to twisted stories repeated blindly by a media that can't think. Scientists think. Journalists print what they're paid to print. Never forget that newspapers are owned and controlled, while scientists are largely free to do what they want. Polygamy is defined simply as multiple marriages, including those who live together as though they are in a group marriage.

What's so bad about that? Nothing, really. What are the facts? Well, for most of human history we've lived a tribal lifestyle. Tribal is very close to full polygamy, yet apart from general repression and murder by ruling nations, tribes themselves are peaceful, happy, and polygamous. Most people in the 'bible' were married to multiple spouses, so that even if one only reads the bible, it's insane to decry the practice wholesale. Insane, and hypocritical.

In fact, up until the 12th century, nobody in any nation would raise an eyebrow if someone they knew or met had multiple spouses. It meant you were doing well as a family. Only poor, struggling, and somewhat crazy people were restricting themselves to a small family with only a single spouse. In agricultural and tribal life, again, polygamy comes naturally. A large family is more likely to survive, and be successful. Christians were not able to ruin it for the world until the iron age.

With the rise of corporations, Christians were for the first time in history able to control multiple nations, sidestep laws, and grow in power. It's not surprising that laws against "indecency, obscenity, nudity, paganism, marriages," and all manner of other non-christian ideals went into place worldwide. By the 1600s the world was just starting to recover from the Christian dark ages where the religion had attempted to control all the major governments directly. Companies arose to build the tall buildings, big ships, and weapons of war. Christians found that their maniacal and obsessive natures fit well with company structures.

Nearly all corporations that I've read about were Christian initially, from the slaving ships of Columbus, to the fleet that forced Japan to "open trade", to the ships that "took" Hawaii, and right up to the invasion of Palestine in 1948 by the United States. Occupying British forces who'd used the nation during WW2 for defense, turned on the Palestinians and struck a deal to hand over control that they'd assumed to a newly formed 'nation', Israel. To get the world to go along with this, the fraud that Israel had been a nation "before" was promoted by worldwide media. They were simply 'taking back what was theirs all along.'

The muslim practice of polygamy has always been peaceful, and only suppressed, religiously dominated, and isolated nations have harmful practices. Iran was a peaceful modern nation until the United States moved in and promoted the overthrow of a peaceful [nonchristian] nation to establish a Christian rule. It failed, and muslim extremists took power. That's the track record of Christian interference, and that's why the world is in such a mess today. 400 years of corporate christian-driven manipulation of nations and people have not brought us peace.

If they'd at least been successful, we would have world peace. That could potentially be justified despite the bloody christian methods of sterilization, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It was the highest irony that Milosevic was charged in a Christian court for cleansing when he was defending against an army that used cluster bombs with incendiaries and phosphorus on civilians. When he threatened to subpoena witnesses to that effect, he suddenly died while in custody despite being in good health prior to his defense.

Polygamy is harmless, just like monogamy is harmless, right? Wait. You're not going to like this, so sit down.

Monogamy is not harmless. The enforced practice of one-spouse is directly linked to poverty in economics. Economics is a science. It requires math to understand it. Economics can be explained in simple terms however, and it's obvious that 3 husbands can support 3 wives, but not obvious that 3 husbands married together can support upwards of 21 wives and hundreds of children! Financially, polygamy is more sound than monogamy.

Monogamy is also not nonviolent. Divorce increases in any nation that legislates marriage to regulate divorce and prohibit polygamy. Violence generally rises as a result. Nations that HAD NO VIOLENCE [Native Americans, Brazilians, etc] did not become known for domestic violence problems until feds stopped them from performing polygamy marriages. America, Ireland, England, and other long-term Westernized nations have MORE domestic violence than many third world nations!

Monogamy is not less repressive of women, but more oppressive. In America more women report that they are denied rights to vote, to work, and to own property than in any other Westernized industrial age nation. It's worse here, not better, for women. American women should marry Northern Europeans, Asian, or African mates if they are concerned about gender equity. In just ONE day, September 15, 2009; 65,321 people were given domestic violence relief services in the United States of America.

Although one can argue numbers all day long, and there is no lie told that is worse than statistics, the science is real and undeniable. Flat-earther's aside, it's easy to see. Debate the percentages, but by engaging in that debate you are admitting that the evidence clearly does NOT show monogamy to be in any way superior.

The UN has most of the sources I'm drawing from, and the rest come from America's own Census data. Scientists look at the sources, the data, and no more serious complaint can come from anyone but the self. When America itself admits to a drug problem, that's a fact by admission, and not a point of debate. When a woman confesses to a murder, the admission is accepted by most thinking adults as proof of guilt.

Scientists however say no, that's not enough. She may be depressed, or coerced while in confinement, we must prove it externally. Science is all about reproducing results, or gaining multiple external proofs when something can't be repeated. Thus, I look not just at what America admits to in her own legal publications, but what other nations and agencies say about America. Amnesty International and the United Nations are pretty clear on these facts too, they see and state that America has drug and domestic violence problems. Thus, it's a reality.

NOTES:

"America" refers to the United States of America, the only nation so named.
I am a graduate student of Physics and Mathematics, as well as Software Engineering.

References:

The United Nations
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=SOWC&f=inID:149

Amnesty International
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/IOR41/022/2010/en
http://www.amnesty.org/en/human-rights

The US Census
http://www.nnedv.org/resources/census.html

Jolicloud: The Hype and the VAPOR.

Jolicloud, ostensibly a "cloud application OS" is really nothing more than a new window manager. It's Ubuntu with all the control and features stripped away to prevent you from doing anything not approved by "Joli." You can't remove icons that promote paid features. It is in short, the AOL of linux.

1. It lacks any specific "Netbook" applications!
2. It has no 3G ability whatsoever!
3. It actually blocks and hides useful internet applications!
4. It has no real "cloud" computational ability!

These four strikes are reason enough to uninstall it immediately. But, I spent some time playing with it, looking around for hidden settings, and trying to find the control panel which IS there, but buried under "legacy" applications. Control Panel is legacy? How very AOL...

This is BigBrother meets Linux. It is seriously the AOL of the linux world.

Not only do I find it abhorrently false in its claims of being a cloud application Operating System, but it's not even vaguely cloudlike except in the vagueness of it all.

It's a cloud all right, it's vaporware.

Review of features:
No Cloud Features. zero points.
No Special Features. zero points.
Removes netbook functions. -100 points. [does the complete opposite of what one would expect*]
Removes user accessible controls. -100 points.

The only other "software" I've ever reviewed in my life that got -200 points is AOL.

Jolicloud really is the AOL of Linux.

* Negative points are 20 for misleading statements, 50 for failure, 100 for actual opposite performance. Worst score possible is 100.

Reasons you might actually WANT to use Jolicloud:

- You love having no ability to control the experience.
- You hate netbooks and just wanted a small laptop.
- You have no internet connection anyway.
- You've always wanted to write a ground-up 3G/4G phone system.

Well, now's your chance. Me, I'm removing this trash this weekend and going back to Ubuntu. The only advantage in trying out Linux based distributions is that I don't need to reformat the drive. I can use use the package manager to strip out the "jolly" and leave Ubuntu. Update, reboot, and I'm done.

Ubuntu has some issues too, but nothing on the order of powers that Jolicloud does. My recommendation is to never install Jolicloud at all. Go directly to Ubuntu for your netbook.

We will sell you popularity: Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, et al.

I hate twitter, and all that pseudo-intellectual bullshit that goes along with "web 2.0" media hype garbage. A 'tweet' is nothing more than a text message. Period. What's so damn 2.0 about a text message? In 2010? Nothing.

Twitter has noticed this, and is now offering to SELL popularity, or promote you to other people on twitter if you pay them extra. This is the nail in the coffin scenario for any startup. When you have to cannibalize your own clients, it's bad.

This is such a stupid situation that I'm writing a 'what is 2.0' post for the Seattle P.I. and I'll link to that here later[1]. News flash: texting is not 2.0. It's 0.5, a step back!

I understand that corporations are desperate to make money, and that publicly traded corporations are under pressure to deliver increased revenue every year. They are not, really, but that's the common lie and I'll just skim over it here for the sake of argument. We all know they want the 'benjamins', and really most people don't have a problem with it because why? We want money too.

It's okay to want money. It's okay to get money through legitimate means. It's not okay to rob, steal, lie, defraud, cheat, or otherwise obtain wealth by nefarious means or at any cost.

When companies begin to become too powerful, they almost immediately start fleecing their clients. This appears to be a natural trend, but competition almost always erupts to put the brakes on that, because as soon as any company starts to get windfall it's going to attract attention from other companies. We can do this too, they say, and do.

That's why it's important not just to the consumer, to the civilians, but to other companies and the government, to allow an equitable market free of excessive regulation or monopolies. Any monopoly must be a government entity that is tightly regulated, and operated for the good of the public, not for profits. Why would you want to do that? Read my article on nonprofits and governance[2]. It's a good, but long, story.

When twitless announced that they're going to start mining their users for money, ala "popularity", also known as 'internal revenues', many greeted it with glee. They should be running. This is a very bad thing. It's bad for business, bad for twits [people who use twitter, and I'm in favor of calling them twats,] and is bound to end in a firestorm of failure. I follow twitter, somewhat reluctantly, because it's just hard not to watch a train wreck when it happens right in front of you.

What do you bring to your customers, Mr/s. Twitter.com? We let them send 150 ASCII limited characters as instant messages to many different devices and via websites.

How is that different from any other instant messenger? It isn't, well, except that you can't send special characters, it's easy to spam, and our target demographic is lower-middle-class people with excessive vanity.

So how do you make a living from this? It's free. We shovel advertising at them as fast as they'll tolerate it.

Why would anyone want that when most IM services do NOT spoon-feed their users advertising messages? We get away with it because we say we're "2.0."

That didn't work for MSN, and why do you think it'll work for you? We think we're smarter than Microsoft.

Good luck with that, Twitter.

1. P.I. blog: http://blog.seattlepi.com/theethicist/archives/214206.asp
2. NP&G: http://sites.google.com/site/ungoth/home/np-g

The Danger of Politicising Science

The "three reviews" - all of which immediately rejected by tin-hat conspiracy wingnuts, have all concluded that "there was no mishandling of data." No intent to discriminate, slant data, hide information, or any other malfeasance of any sort. Period. Is that enough? Hell no, politicians are still trying to blast the scientists for not being "transparent enough," an argument that is patently bullshit. Even the article itself admits, and the critics admit, that ALL the data is publicly available. ANYONE on Earth could have compared the data and produced their own independent results.

The key word was COMPETENCE. "Anyone competent" could have obtained and analyzed the data. There we go. That's the heart of the problem. Politicians are NOT competent scientists, and they never will be.

This article continues on after this revelation, to vilify the scientists who were not "transparent enough" with freedom of information requests. The article fails to make note of the volume and frequency of FoiA requests that the CRU was subject to. It amounted to procedural terrorism. They were inundated with spurious, stupid, off-topic, irrelevant, and duplicate requests on an hourly basis from all around the World. I'd say that from all the evidence, they failed to respond only to a handful of the most noxious requests. So what failure rate is that, 1%? 5%?

That's not much of a glaring failure in the way that this article paints it. The media continues to play-up scare tactics and one-sided reporting as though it were professional journalism. Journalists should take note: You are not scientists either, not by quite a long measure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10538198.stm

Knoppix

I never fail to be amused and surprised by what I can get away with when using knoppix. I had installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot with Vista, and got grub errors on the reboot because the partition was too far out on the disk. The older BIOS can't read beyond the 1024 sector limit and the LBA on that BIOS isn't adaptive. So, I need to move partitions. Fine. Knoppix can do that.

First, "sudo testdisk" to repair the MBR so windows can boot. Reboot into windows and shutdown cleanly so that I can move the partition. Resizing it will take about 15 minutes. I'll make a 4 gig FAT32 boot partition and a 4 gig EXT4 partition in the beginning of the drive so both windows and linux can find their boot systems.

Parted on Knoppix runs fast and easy. I'd already installed Ubuntu so I don't need to redo that. I'm strictly moving partitions around, and then I'll reinstall grub so that it can find them. This laptop had no windows boot partition so I'm creating that using a freedos option. That way there's a windows rescue option if there are any viral problems.

Back in the old days it would have been a complete reinstall of both linux and windows to fix these issues.

Murder?

If you or I pulled a gun and then shot someone, it wouldn't matter how much we argued that it was an accident.

"I'm sorry your honor, I only meant to tase him. I didn't realize that the totally different carbon steel Desert Eagle 12-round pistol had been drawn instead of the aluminum and plastic stungun. My bad."

That argument is as bullshit as the indifference the police [and pro-police conservatives] hold towards human life.

America on the whole views it as acceptable to kill people who are in your way, offend you, or don't gleefully adhere to the laws passed by a corporate-controlled congress of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs).

That a nearby BART cop uttered the N-word means nothing, of course. An astonishing 39% of CNN polled respondents believe the police shouldn't be charged with anything. After all, the victim isn't a rich white dude.

Rights only apply to people who deserve them. That's the tenet of all well-established governments thus far in human history. I'm not an advocate of this school of thought, and the wiser among you detect my sarcasm.

Anticipation, and High Hopes.

There is only one thing more exciting than this trailer is to me, and that's the hope that someone like Jackson might decide to accept a deal to do this. I do hope the actor who obtains the role of Elric is up to the task, for it is no small job but one that even Johnny Depp may not be up to. Elric is whimsical, extremely subtle, quiet, and generally refuses to explain himself. Characters like that are hard to carry, and Elric is one with so much depth that may be lost on an un-read audience, whereas those who've read the books will be expecting their Eternal Champion. The actor himself would need to be a god among men just to pull off the role.

Being as Harlock is all CGI, however inspiring, the only acting required is good voice work. Harlock too is a shy anti-hero, difficult to understand, and unwilling to placate. Both are Kings in their own worlds, and not through a lack of violence by any means. I find that as many very educated, intellectual persons seem to also find, the anti-hero is appealing beyond mere fantasy - it is a form of freedom we all wish to obtain in one way or another. They are the success stories in their own times.

In both cases, these men are self-made, but quite a bit more than just a man by his own means which honestly appeals to a great many other men - they are men who should have failed. Elric is a crippled albino who relies on magic to stay alive, Harlock a mere boy who shocked grown men with his ferocity and drive. Both could only succeed with a great deal of skill, intelligence, and by simply getting up every time they get knocked down until they are the last one standing.

Americans, many modern feminists, and nearly all women could benefit by trying to understand these characters - particularly where they find themselves attracted to such traits - because there is good reason for it. Girls are coddled, hugged, and fussed over when they are hurt. Boys are told to stop crying, even slapped at if they don't. The severe disparities in gender roles that people take for granted have never gone away or even abated in this "modern" society, and as such, men take themselves to be not just different than women categorically but actually removed from the sphere of femininity. We are not, or should not be. To be feminine is the hallmark of homosexuality, and continues to be stereotyped as such even in the predominantly homosexually populated movie industry of Hollywood. Men are not soft, easy, supported, or celebrated. Not in Western cultures.

The desire, therefore, of most intellectual males is to not only supersede the stereotype by stepping beyond it, but to attain such rank that even the most gender-breaking act is seen as manly when they do it. I won't ruin either movie by giving away scenes, but this happens in both character cases. A character attains a nearly godlike status of 'anti-hero' when the male lead can kiss another male with sincerity and as a gesture of affection, and nobody thinks "gay." This is the simple kiss one brother will give to another in almost any culture, and it's familial, without any real sexuality attached, however in Western cultures such things as hand-holding and kissing among men is absolutely taboo.

It's a small thing, and a powerful thing at the same time. As I said, very subtle characters require exquisite acting, and few are up to such a task. These are male characters that women die for, literally. This itself is a direct send-up of how men are treated in our societies where the reverse is most often true. Their sexuality isn't the point, or the question, but an illustration of how "male" they are. It's a question of self. The anti-hero gained rapidly in popularity throughout multiple cultures and in many forms of fiction as women's rights gained ground and men began to be castigated, stereotyped, and blamed.

I predict that either movie, made today, would net profits in the Billions.

netbooks

After months of enjoying my HP mini, I decided to see what else runs on these devices and came across Jolicloud. The install went smoothly, and it took about as long to install Jolicloud as it does for WinXP to boot. Joli starts faster and uses the wifi natively, however there is not yet any support for 3G. I thought that might be a problem, but there's only two places I ever go where wifi hasn't been available. Now that McD's and SB both offer free wifi, it seems like I won't really need to worry about when Joli releases the post-beta version with 3G.

As with most linux distributions, Jolicloud comes with a lot of software ready to go, such as Chrome and Firefox, Pidgin, and so on. It does not have Open Office or GIMP because of the small install size, but you can add them quite easily. It does have Quake Live, and that's been quite a distraction recently. Takes me back...

OpenComments goes Full Retard. Film at Eleven.

OC is apparently little more than a spammish redirect to the already stupidly useless google groups. There's no warning or mention of the very inanely useless nature of the "application" or the need to sixteen clicks to install, redirect, register, redirect again, find what page you're on, close those extra six window tabs, and then wonder why you still can't see a single message because you're still not "joined" to a group.

What a pile of shite.

I can't get past the incredibly roundabout way the "application" just forces you into google groups, a den of mediocrity at best, often only slightly more intelligent than IRC chats. What's the point? There are already websites and plugins for using groups, and I highly doubt that this is a productive or useful way to use the groups. Furthermore, it's not really an application so much as a hopelessly complicated way to bookmark a service that I hate.

Upon install you'll immediately want to gouge your eyes out due to the extremely ugly configuration. AFter a few dozen clicks you'll start to get sick of the bullshit. Just how damned hard does it need to be to leave a freakin comment? I don't want a damn comment group chat buddy system anywa. I want a way to warn other people about BAD sites like cybergasm.com or whatever the fuck they call themselves - which is just a website populated by keywords, with the sole purpose of getting clicks on ads.

Open Comments is Total Failure. Get rid of the mandatory groups drivel. Why the HELL would you make people log in six times? Who in their left mind would ever want to do that? Two minutes using this interface and I already hate you.

Uninstalled, shitlisted, and banned from my servers.

Free, but... is it worth it?

University of the People, an interesting study in how to educate the poor, is just clearing the fourth quarter of its first year. There are A LOT of things that need to be fixed, and I can provide a laundry list of details, but for a free institution it's not bad. Is it worth it? I can't even say. The quality is NOT high, but what's the harm in repeating a class when there's no tuition or fees? Well, there's still time wasted. 10 weeks is 10 weeks.

These classes need serious overhauling for structure, communication, and the testing is especially poor quality. If these things are fixed, then when UofP is ready to begin handing out Bachelors degrees I may be willing to pay the graduation fee [expected to be merely one hundred dollars.]

It's hard to complain too loudly over something so incredibly low priced, and I want to encourage them to continue, but it still has to work. It can't be a joke, or it will never get accredited, and then nobody will want to attend.

Still, it's worthwhile I believe, and I'm going to continue attending despite some howling errors in the website and a pathetic testing system. "a) all of the above" is not a logical answer when all the "above" questions are b, d, and e. Yes, 'c' was "none of the above." Scrambled questions, anyone? At least one final exam question was a BLANK that merely inquired "true or false." There's an existential question...

seriously... what the hell is wrong with ubuntu?

I've never seen so much asshattery as I encounter with the ubuntu team. From the hostile forums, to the beta-testing of inferior tools to the exclusion of tools that WORK, to the limitations of the installer, to the deletion of popular programs that have WORKED VERY WELL, to releasing immature software, and above all THE EXTREME ATTITUDE.

Your way is not the only way, nor is it even among the best.

Ubuntu has lost my trust, permanently, with this latest fiasco. They fucked up the IPV6 stack. You update to 10.04 and BAM, no internet. You can NOT get back online. You have to do a FRESH install of an older version and at the cost of formatting your drive. Hope you backup your stuff as aggressively as I do!

NOBODY can claim competence and fuck up that badly. It's like hiring a highly trained combat experienced limo driver who suddenly can't stop slamming into people whenever he drives you anywhere. You just can't trust them anymore. At all. It doesn't matter what the reason is.

Ubuntu used to be my favorite thing in the world of software. It was a delight. Well, they've fallen quite a long way from BEST and most popular to 'best imitation of a Windows Release.'

FUCK UBUNTU.

Changes. Speaking of Change, what've we got?

GONE:
- The Bill of Rights. None of these rights are intact. The Nazi Supreme Court sides with only corporate interests.
- Enjoying music on the PC. All but gone. DRM has derailed Operating Systems, and the CIA backdoors that are legally required make for easy pickings with virus writers.
- Privacy. Gone, if you are not aware of Linux. Computer privacy is all but vanquished, and only the millions of linux users are keeping it alive, but it's really on a downhill slide to hell.
- International Rights. These are a joke. Corporate interests dictate policy to Canada, United States, all of Europe, and most of the world.
- Right to citizenship. Not.
- Peace. Goodbye, we barely knew thee.

Coming:
- Morality based laws where poverty is a crime.
- Failing to buy something you don't need is becoming a crime.
- Enforced marketing tactics. Can you imagine US Marshals selling diamonds? Get used to the idea.
- Debtor Prison. This is already happening in 38 states! Behind on payments? You're under arrest! Several nations including Canada have begun arresting those who suffer economically - as though ANYONE WANTS TO BE POOR.
- Nazi SS international military forces. Ala Blackwater/Halliburton. Corporate police ten times as frightening as those portrayed in Brave New World or 1984.

Welcome to your new world order.

Hail Halliburton.

"War is Peace.
Slavery is Freedom." - 1984

I am a Web Project Developer. This is how you attract me to your company...

First, I scan employment ads looking for keywords the same way you scan resumes. I'd rather be contracted than hourly, so I look for the type of position offered as either "contract" or "consultant". If the word "salary" pops up, I will read that one too. Salary is the best world for web project design and development managers. You can rest assured that this first step eliminates most job offers. I'm not the least bit worried about that.

Hourly web developer? In house? No thanks, I don't want to work in a boiler room with irate management constantly changing the terms under which I'm supposed to be productive! This week it's all Java, next week the flavor is Ruby and I'm supposed to redo the entire site overnight. You can do that, right? No. I'd need to be three people AND like you. I live by contracts that have my productivity measured by outcome and final product.

Second, when you overuse technology terms I delete your email, ESPECIALLY when you mix and match incompatible technologies! That tells me that you're going to micromanage me, and that you don't know anything about what I'll be doing. GOOD websites require a development path that you're unlikely to understand - or even allow.

Third, expressly listing all Microsoft's most recent software does the opposite of impress me. I delete those job offers without even looking at the money offered. I can't stand working for people who have no idea what I do. The presence of ANY Microsoft trade names in your job offer or advertisement is a giant red flag visible from space.

A: The web runs best and longest on linux servers. Less downtime, less maintenance, and no licensing headaches. Microsoft has only one goal: To get all your money. They have no goal of being an excellent software producer or they'd have gone open-source ages ago. Linux has only one goal: To be the best software. That's where I want to be.
B: Microsoft tools, development, and education is horridly expensive. You have a limited pool of skilled people with Microsoft, whereas anyone can use and learn linux for free. I'd prefer to have my budget dictated by the product, not the license.

Finally, the world uses linux voluntarily. People are forced to use Microsoft. That alone should tell you something! You think MSFT is better? I have bad news for you. Every major OS on the planet right now is derived from UNIX, even MSFT's systems. The primary difference is that MSFT's take on *nix is called "NT." That still stands for "Not today, and not Tommorrow." Is that the way you want to operate your company, with software that fails to deliver on promises?

Don't cripple me with bad software and then ask me to be a wizard for your company!

Also, posting .ASP, .NET, and C# in your employment offer has a certain appeal to it, and here are comparable levels of appeal:
- Graphic artist wanted, must know how to use MSFT "Paint."
- CEO wanted, must know how to spin around in her chair while speaking.
- Air Force Pilot wanted, must know how to make airplane noises with your mouth.
- Layout Designer wanted, must know how to use "Internet Exploder 5.0".

I could go on.

What to do?

DO state what the purpose of your web project IS.
DO state that you are open about which tools may be used.
DO listen and look for LINUX respondents to your advertising.
DO avoid overloading the job offer with lots of buzzwords.
DO avoid wish-listing the employee skills. Do you want one person or a horde?
DO avoid insinuating, or expecting, that I will want to wear "several hats." I do NOT.

Best practices?

Accept that people like me are highly intelligent, self-employed, and often own other companies. I own two. We want to do our best for you. It's in my nature, for example, to want to finish everything that I start.

I do NOT interview well. I am shy, joke too much, and interrupt. I'd prefer you asked me math or programming questions. I'd rather take a test than interview. Be aware that highly technical people can be loose on the human interactions scale. I prefer machines to most people. The machines are smarter.

Do expect that if you hire a genius, you'll get someone with their own ideas who'll want to merge with your company - not be consumed by it.

Do attempt to hire people for ingenuity, initiative, and education. Don't fear including self-education. Lots of geeks are self-taught. If someone offers books by someone called "OReilly" as their education, don't be surprised. Also expect to see more than one school. I've been in 12 different colleges.

The technology job market requires constant re-evaluation not just of your business, but of my skills. I'm constantly having to learn new things. That does NOT mean that what you want to do requires all the newest things! Many "web 2.0" ideas are completely rehashed from the nineties and can be accomplished with XML.

If you want real genius, ask for code samples or software demos instead of a resume.

from my blackberry

I have had this phone for more than a year now and I am still quite taken with it.
This is the first time I have tried to post with it, and like so many other things in my life that has just changed.
My new 2nd job is as a real estate broker. We have all the Harry Potter movies on bluray as Geris birthday present and have been watching them all weekend.
In an attempt to fix a dodgy toilet we discovered that its more fun to replace it, and cheaper. Our new roof is done, and missing only the zinc and trim. We also picked colors for the house.

I never imagined that I would care about paint samples.

The hearse is getting a new catalytic unit monday too. I am now so highly skilled at govt database work that twice D.C. Has deferred to my judgment.
And yet, I am bored. Grad school AND work is not challenging enough. It was this that caused the creation of a new gaming company based in Seattle and Denmark. They are fabulously talented girls and boys.
After mulling over the evil that is facebook I have decided to make it the company profile.

So very many changes, and all to the eventual good, even facebook, which needs a bit of slapping about before Z will listen.

Is the IMF destroying small business and the middle class? YES.

The IMF imposes harsh restrictions in return for bailout money, but it's not cutting executive salaries, forcing the rich to repay illegal gains, or chasing down corruption in the Greece government - or any other government. No, instead the IMF forces nations to obey the will of a corporation. Create more slavery.

The middle class is being edged out worldwide by policies that directly impact the working classes and the poor. Public funds are shut off completely to repay the debts of the rich. Small businesses are being hit with enormous taxes, at a time when their customers are dwindling, and they're losing the race against time for survival. The policies of the IMF demand that poverty programs are eliminated, that working classes take lower pay, and that all public benefits are cut severely.

These actions do not stabilize a nation, they DESTABILIZE them. IMF will lead to a revolution in Greece, in which a new government will step in to "solve" the problem and create a new class of serfs. 'Here's your food and housing coupon, corporate citizen, now get back to work before I have you shot.'

It already happened in Iceland, which started dealing with the IMF in 2006! Look at how well that turned out for Iceland, and you get a better view of how the IMF is dealing with each nation it loans to. The entire process is a hegemony, designed to drive power away from local government to corporations.

Douchebag Dmcgraw on virtualbox forums

I'm not using windows, and I go to the forums looking for help. As with most "forums" - a piss-poor way to provide customer service by the way, it's run by the self-proclaimed asshat who spends more time fucking with people than answering questions. dmcgraw proclaims rather usefully "we don't discuss pirated software." The post had NOTHING to do with pirated software, rather this TOOL has decided to persecute someone who isn't using some software that Mr. McGraw approves of.

This is the kind of snake-oil attitude that makes open source look bad. His insipid harassment of a hapless user is without intelligence, merit, or purpose. The question was never answered, and all my searching on virtualbox's semi-putrid help forum resulted in no answer, rather in each case, the fucktard berates the user for mentioning OTHER software that has nothing to do with virtualbox.

Nice.

If virtualbox was expecting contributions from my corporation, they can forget it. I HATE HATE HATE idiots who think that a gods-damned forum is in ANY way resembling actual customer service. It's proof of laziness, evidence of lack of effort, and certifies an absence of intent to provide quality service.

I universally view unilateral forum-linking to SPAM activities, a denial of customer service, and a general lack of intelligence on the part of the programmer/group who promotes it.

1. I don't want to register for your website to pump up your advertisement revenue so that I can get service from you, or more accurately, be harassed and denied service, witness your asshole attitude to other users who're attempting to get help, and read your sycophant's butt-licking posts about how great you are.

2. Twenty years of experience with support, infrastructure, and management in large corporations has taught me that the best way to ignore a customer and avoid the costs of providing service is to push everyone into VOICEMAIL, FORUMS, and SUPPORT TICKETS. Contrary to the popular perception that a support ticket system will increase accountability and customer service - the opposite is an absolute truth. These features of "customer service" will cause me to take my business elsewhere. Telco's are famous for doing all of the above, and most people despise telcos.

3. Google searches which lead to forums will cause me to unload and delete your product. I've seen repeatedly over the last decade a movement to push all responsibility right out the fucking window. Developers DO NOT WANT TO PROVIDE SUPPORT. They'll do anything to avoid work, most of them, and that's why they became programmers. I'm a programmer, and I'm the same way, so the shit doesn't work on me.

4. Of the thousands of attempts that I've sincerely made since the 90s to get support from Email-based systems, forum systems, "online help" pages, and user groups... the ones that ACTUALLY PROVIDED HELP were never websites that were in any way connected to the software corporation or owners. Private blogs, hobbyists, dedicated artists, and other individuals who blog about walk-throughs and provide reviews of software do a much better job.

5. My google search string includes the default "-forum -faq -group -asp -mailing". So, not only do I now routinely NOT SEE results that include forums and other crap, but I've begun marking websites that publish addresses to "help" forums as Spam in Adblocker so that I NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN.

Way to fail, asshole. Dmcgraw just cost his parent software company about ten thousand dollars in direct sales/support, and gained this blog post about what an asshole he is to everyone online. This will further the lost business as my blog post will gain more hits than his one-liner retorts to people who dare to ask him for help on his personal soapbox - the virtualbox forum.

~D

Rhyme Paradox

12 hours at work, and yet far from challenged. Tired, but completely bored. I practiced bass for less than an hour, and now my hands feel so much better although somewhat tired - and I could almost hear the music in my head. I need lessons though, or this will be a longer road than it needs to be. Genius or not, self taught is slower than having someone hand me a set of instructions.

Another 12 hour day tomorrow, and my exam next week on the same day as the Dentist. Too damn busy, but it's all going to be worth it. In the last few years I've experienced something that's never happened before: hard work actually pays off. Not labor though, the work of learning. Work smart, not hard. The more mentally challenging my landscape, the brighter my day.

Almost hurts to type, but I'm sure I'll get over that.

SSL secure, browsers NOT.

It turns out that the government IS spying on not just anyone, but EVERYONE. Not just any government - all governments. Browser weaknesses allow ANY browser accepting CAs to be used as an espionage tool without alerting the user. The weakness? Certificate Authorities willingly leak keys to agents who ask for them. This allows seamless interception of ALL messages, Email, web browsing, and in the case of Windows - your entire operating system.

1st Nail:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/researchers-reveal-likelihood-governments-fake-ssl

2nd Nail:
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslsniff/

3rd Nail:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Sony-PlayStation-PS3-VeriSign-SSL,news-3235.html

In Science, it is necessary to provide only ONE piece of evidence to disprove a theory, and at least three pieces to promote a theory. That makes things pretty robust, and that's why the "theory" of evolution is so strong. After 100+ years, nobody has introduced anything to actually disprove evolution. In the meantime, thousands of pieces of supporting evidence flow in each year - reinforcing the theory.

When THREE pieces of evidence come in to disprove a theory - it's considered absolutely dead in the water, sink it, bury the pond, and plant tulips. The theory that browsers are secure is utterly shattered.

Sleep well.

Asimov was right...

This is similar to my P.I. article.

America's highest technology has been outsourced overseas in never-before seen multinational supra-corporate development - in which corporations take precedence over nations.

Here on the Rolls website:
http://www.rolls-royce.com/defence/products/combat_jets/f136.jsp
And again, here on the Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/19/f35b_vertical_landing/page2.html

It is clearly and openly discussed as a corporate enterprise covering multiple nations security forces. Rolls Royce must have pretty high security clearances. Sure, I bet they're required by a contract to conform to security standards and not to share the technology, but never before have corporations been the guardians and keymasters of critical technology. In the past this was always a US laboratory staffed and operated by an elite team of scientists - who often worked WITH corporations and the military, but not FOR.

Nations are merging into corporate "bloks" as predicted by Communism. Yeah, you know, Communism, the USSR, et al. The Russians were right. Human rights and civil rights, nation economies, and peace are all less important today than corporate profits. Anything is good when it's gold is the growing and prevalent morality.

More Marketing Bullship using made up numbers

Apple Insider, also known as the Apple Liar magazine, is so far up Apple's backside that I can't believe anyone takes this seriously as journalism. The most recent fiasco today is the tiny, statistically insignificant study that the released citing how " 40% of Blackberry users would buy an iPhone."

BULLSHIT. Why would you trade in a Rolls Royce for a Toyota?

Technology impairment aside, why would I want a phone that locks down everything, deletes my personal data without asking, and basically have to deal with a tyrannical company that's imitating Microsoft business practices? Few people like AT&T, and though the iPhone was cool when it came out, Apple shot itself in the butt by forcing ALL iPhone owners to use AT&T - a convicted felon.

AT&T then of course proved that it's now a different company by behaving responsibly and opening up the phone... not. That's alternate universe-land. AT&T proceeded to lock the iPhone down even further.

A quick look at this "study" - an abuse of the word if I've ever seen one, reveals that less than a 100 people responded to the Blackberry question, not 1000+ as the advertising insists. Even 1000 users is irrelevant if they're all coming in through a Pro-Apple marketing campaign!

The company that released this bogus data gives NO sources, no methodology, and in short, there's no way to check their numbers. In other words, it's all lies. On the internet, if you don't provide proof, you might as well be lying.

Why? Because it's too easy to just quote your sources [ABC survey co] and methodology [rigorous double blind, randomized questions] as well as your data manipulation methods [incidence of dual ownership, leapfrogging, per capita, etc.]

The iPhone marketing scam, I mean this latest advertising disguised as a survey, does none of that. After "registering" with the "survey" company, you get a little bit more data - enough to see that they're basically lying through their teeth.

CAVEAT EMPTOR.

1 DO NOT believe everything in print.
2 Consider the source.
3 A little paranoia will save you a lot of money.

re:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/03/16/39_of_blackberry_owners_say_theyd_switch_to_an_iphone.html

Oscars = Incestuous Process = Self-serving.

The largest voting block is: actors.

Thus, an anti-war film, highest grossing movie ever, with stellar performances and all-around five-star skill put into the movie gets beat by a cheap, flawed, and pro-war movie. How? The pro-war movie kissed actors asses.

It didn't help that the BETTER movie had animation and that threatened the Academy, which has always shied away from SciFi for exactly that reason: They're afraid of technology replacing them.

I have bad news for the Academy. Too late. The Oscars will fade into deserved low-attendance and become an inner-circle ritual. That's my prediction for 2010. By 2020, the Oscars will either cease to be run by the same Academy, or will have embraced technology, or will cease to exist.

Why? Compare them:
1. Movie of the year: 11 Million, 500 theaters, most people didn't really like it.
2. Nominee with no awards: 5 Trillion, 50000 theaters, everyone on Earth loved it.

The money will go away from the Oscars and for the films that do NOT win. Thus, the Oscars have shot themselves in the foot and become irrelevant to film, in exactly the same way that actors have just signed and sealed their doom.

Indie producers such as myself and my friends already avoid, abhor, and have extreme distrust of Union-Card bearing actors who want to work with us. They bring the danger of entanglement, cost overruns, and having an actor tell you how to produce your movie. I've seen this, and it sucks. I never want to work with another SAG actor in my life, and I'll refuse to even where there is money on the table.

When you give in to actors, the producer gets another bomb like the one 'Charly' Theron delivered in Aeon Flux. The freakin' anniversary release of the TV show did better than the motion picture on DVD sales. That's how bad, how disappointing, and how stupid the movie was. Sure, take the main character, and completely reinvent it in a way that diametrically opposes the entire basis of the character, and premise of the film. That's Charred, all right.

I've been on sets to observe actors backtalking producers and directors, and flinch when the director or producer fails to correct them. "Actors are fragile," they say. No, Actors are actors. If they can't act, or won't, replace them.

The Academy that runs the Oscars is run by actors, and so every film that wins awards is basically just an Actor favorite. There's no public vote, no vote across the spectrum of movie production - the grips and lighting techs have no say in the matter. It's not a Democracy. It's an industry-serving process as fake as the Monkees and Hannah Montana.

Money is more important than a gold statue, and will continue to be much more sought-after than the lauding of false praises by soon-to-be unemployed actors.

Chinese Human Trafficking

I am two things, I am a scientist foremost, and a humanist second. There are very clear reasons why humanity comes second to science in my mind -which may sound evil or heartless, but it's actually nothing of the sort. Without Science, humanity will soon be a moot point. The Earth will continue regardless of us.

So, when I see these many articles critical of China, I am appalled and aghast at THE REPORTING. Journalists have NO IDEA how to handle raw data, and do so at the expense of human lives. They routinely, and often intentionally, overstate or misstate the realities to generate a public reaction. This is known as sensationalism. This is why China gets increasingly frustrated with the USA.

FACTS:
China
Total Population: 1.6 Billion.
Abductions estimate: less than 100 per province per year. [At least I've seen no data indicating larger numbers, all reports are in the dozens, sometimes as few as 6, and it is VERY difficult to average out.] Going with a clearly high estimate, that is ONE in 16 Million. [Gross - all ages.] ((Data? See link 2.))

USA
Total Population: 310 Million.
Abductions estimate: 600,000[1]
That's one in 517 people. [All ages, again.]

Which country has a problem? The United States has 30,000 times more trafficking than China. Again, these are raw numbers, arguable numbers, but the overall data is completely clear - America has a much worse problem than China.

China reacts to incidents of trafficking by punishing everyone involved, and in China, jail isn't a place I'd want to end up. They don't give you televisions and horse racing tracks in China, no matter who you are. There is no "house arrest" for the rich. It's a brick and iron cell - they way a prison should be if you're to have one at all. Yes, Science backs incarceration - when done properly and humanely. The purpose of prison is to punish AND reform. You want to release a viable citizen back into the population as soon as reasonable to do so.

In the United States, prisons are run by abusive overzealous religious wingnuts who enjoy tormenting others. I've met too many of them in my pursuit of a law degree and as someone born into extreme poverty. US jailers are to be feared. I'm not so sure I'd be afraid of jailers in China, where abuses by the officials are met with extreme sanctions, including death.

I am not pro-China, or pro-Communist. I think it's easy to show where science and humanity suffered under "pure" communist rule. However, China is no longer purely communist, and much of the worst that we've come to associate with China is simply no longer true. In fact, the United States is currently much more dangerous than China in many ways. People who protest at the White House get shot with rubber bullets, thrown down by firehoses, arrested, beaten, and even killed. Protests in China are generally met with a calm disdain. The tables, as it were, have turned.

The News Media, I will capitalize because it's a monopoly, more properly known as an OLIGOPOLY of media, will routinely show old footage of people being harassed, and entitle it "today's protest in Beijing." There are major problems with reporting like this, not the least of which is that it's lying, but that not all protests go like that. Peaceful disagreement is respected by the Chinese. Most Americans are completely unaware that China has respect for and actually listens to appropriate political discourse. That's just not what one sees in the news, is it?

What you see on the news are foreign activists who are inciting riot, throwing things, and using loudspeakers. Shouting is extremely rude in most Asian cultures. You can tell a native protest by the quiet, by the symmetry, and by the intellectual level of the protest. The loud, violent, and unruly mobs - those are often lead by non-Chinese persons. These are the people who are arrested and deported, as one of our professors [dumbass] from Evergreen State College discovered.

Here is a quote from a science article about the actual response of the Chinese government in a typical child trafficking ring:

"
Chinese officials arrested 27 suspects in November of 2005.
The Hengdong SWI director’s one-year sentence was the lightest.
The court sent three of the traffickers to prison for 15 years and
fined them each 50,000 yuan (U.S. $6,250).
It sentenced another six traffickers to between three and thirteen years.
Also, the gov-ernment fired 23 county officials in Hengyang and prohibited in-
tercountry adoptions from Hunan Province for several months.
"[2]

I wish we had that level of direct action in the US government when it comes to ANY act of treason by our own Congress: Selling secrets, giving nukes to allies, killing for fun, giving immunity for bribes, accepting bribes to pass laws, and so on ad nauseum. China tolerates none of that.

1
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking/about/fact_human.html
2
http://www.ethicanet.org/MeierZhang.pdf

It's now possible to affect voting via internet.

Ars often overstates things, but this data comes from Pew, a conservative foundation that rarely overstates anything. More Americans get their news online than from newspapers, and the internet is now third as a source of news - the boob tube is still raking in more eyeballs in both #1 and #2 positions for national and local broadcasts.

Personally, I find it harder and harder to even watch a single TV show. I've expunged all older TVs from my house but for two - those two owned by my mate. We've got a new LCD coming and I hope to convince her to give away the last two CRTs. What's the big deal? Energy, for one. Attention is the other.

CRTs have a way of sucking people in, drawing your consciousness away from family and your surroundings. Flat screens do not have that affect on me or my kids. I don't know what it is, either the emissions, the light, or something else is just different. Movies look a hell of a lot better on an LCD, and I love movies, but after the movie I can easily get up and go do something else instead of sitting there watching whatever comes on next. Since I started watching movies on my laptop a few years ago I noticed this phenomena.

I've gone kayaking more, gone running more, and I'm generally less interested in television. I wonder how this will shift when more Americans have had their CRTs pass away. Will TV still be the #1 news source? I can't imagine it. The internet is so much more interactive, and with blindingly fast coverage of evolving events. Often long before anyone can cover something up, the video is on youtube.

What's this about voting then? The internet is already affecting voting. People get a more diverse opinion from reading online than is possible from newsprint. Editors carefully control what goes into a newspaper. I know, I've worked for a few. They're so tightly wound they could make coal into diamonds if they sit on it. The internet? Not nearly so much. Often webmasters are their own editors, which gives the lie to grammar nazis worldwide: It doesn't matter. Spelling, word order, and usage, all right out the window.

What's important is the message, and how intelligently is it delivered. TV? Not very intelligent. People like O'Really and Snowjob and Coultroll seem to dominate the press - they're everywhere and overquoted. Stupid is absolutely the rule of the day in TVland. Internet? Intelligence and logic have much more bearing, with actual scientists, experts, and millions of commenters ready to correct any obvious lie.

Obviously, I am biased, for I am a blogger. Not widely read? I don't really care. Blogging has never been about being a media whore. It's about getting information out there. When it comes to voting, knowing the truths about your party and the enemy party is vital. I credit the internet for Obama's election, and thank science for it.





Re:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/02/internet-overtakes-print-in-news-consumption-among-americans.ars

Statocide - The Act of Killing by Numbers.

Israel is the worst evil to ever grace the Earth since the Third Reich, as no other nation has relentlessly executed civilians with such venom and vigor the way Hitler did. Nobody, that is, until Israel - a state bent on the complete genocide of Palestinians. A fictional state, in a land that never existed, a land called "wishful thinking."

No evidence exists for pre-industrial Israelites except the bible itself, which is well documented as a complete fabrication of fairy tales. Why should the world take a book, known and admitted as a farce, as any serious historic legend? There ARE other books and scrolls which actually enumerate the population, show census maps, and taxes collected by ethnicity and business. The middle ages and early B.C.E. were pretty well documented, and the bible contradicts everything we know.

So why take it seriously? Because of the insanity of faith. Faith allows for Americans to turn their heads and whistle while Israel bombs schools and hospitals. Faith allows Americans to approve and shout "support our troops" while the USA destroys Afghanistan and Iraq for profits. Millions have died, and the rough numbers in the middle East have already exceeded the genocide of Nazi Germany.

Faith make this possible. Is it any wonder that non-believers look upon believers as dangerous and crazy? Believers are otherwise kind, intelligent, and productive people - who support mass murder, suppression of equality on a world scale, and the destruction of opponent religions on a world scale.

Israel itself has built up such a history of abuse of power and destruction that its enemies are prepared to destroy their own families just for a shot at getting even. You never read about Palestine invading Israel, raping and pillaging, bulldozing communities, and then having the nerve to accuse Israel of "offending" it. But, you read that sort of drivel from Israel almost every day. Each atrocity is committed with bland statements of "sovereignty" or "destiny." Israel's only destiny is immediately apparent when one simply looks at a globe map of the Earth.

Without the constant military, financial, and political support of the United States, not only would Israel not ever have existed, but it will immediately cease to exist. Israel has surrounded itself with enemies that could have been close allies. Muslims and Jews are not so different. In fact, they lived side-by-side, in peace, for over a thousand years before Americans decided to "Fix things."

Now, as America falters, and her dollar wanes, the USA is suddenly worried about the future of Israel. They should have thought of that in 1948, when the US sent tanks and bombers against peaceful desert nomads and tribal societies. The victory was quick, not because of god, but because of wave after wave of high-explosives and armor-piercing ammo used against an unarmed opponent who had no reason to expect an invasion.

The future of Israel is the same future that they wished upon Palestine. Death. All will die, and I say this not out of hate, for I am Jewish, but out of a scientific certainty. These are the categories of Israel's death.

They will die Economically:
Israel is a nation of less than 8 million people, and only 22K sq kilometers, with a per-capita military spending of over 25% of their GDP per person, and only 23K average earnings per person. They are heavily indebted to the tune of trillions, to the United States for ongoing financial and military support that they otherwise could never afford. There is no sign that the USA is requiring payment, in fact the USA continues to sink Billions a year into Israel with no sign of slowing, despite an economic slide in Israel from +3% to -1% annual growth rate. [2009]

They will die Geopolitically:
Israel is surrounded on ALL sides by enemies. Even the Mediterranean Sea offer no protection, as it is largely controlled on the Eastern shores by Russian allies who are strongly anti-Israel. The 12 nations surrounding Israel are entirely Arab, massing more than 140 million people, with an area better than 20 times larger than Israel. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are particularly well armed, far more powerful each of them than Israel. Syria is now receiving Russian munitions, nuclear power, and training. The Arab states have met repeatedly to discuss the "Israel" situation and are of one mind on the problem. Eliminate it.

They will die from Powerlessness:
Israel may have one or two nukes. That'd be unfortunate, because if they attempted to use them, they'd soon find that several of their enemies have quite a bit more than two. Also, if it were discovered that they used a U.S. produced system to deliver nuclear weapons, the United States would immediately face international scorn and legal entanglements that we'd be decades sorting out. The United States has repeatedly denied arming Israel, which is a patent lie on the face of things.

They will die from Starvation:
Israel has destroyed the farmlands. Palestine was a nation rich in agriculture - once, before Israel. Now, they slave Palestinian farmers for their food source, but still need to import over 50 Billion a year in resources - for a nation with a GDP of only 500 Billion and over two thirds of that is US Foreign Aid, that's pretty bad news. When the fighting starts in earnest, Israel will get no food.

They will die from International Isolation:
Israel has become such a political pariah, internationally condemned for gross violations of Human rights, and such a malignant cancer on the peace process, that nobody will feel the least bit sorry for Israel - not even American Jews like me. I have distant family there who will possibly die. My words to them are "get out while you can. I won't feel sorry for you if you stay."

Enough Israel. It's time for world peace. It's time for Israel to fade from the stage.

Gmail is fucking up.

They decided that because I wrote two or three people on craigslist that I meet the characteristics of a "spammer." They disabled my email account and I can't write anyone.

This is yet another reason NEVER to trust any corporation, not even Google.

They're fucking idiots.
[update]
Two days later, and the fucktards at Gmail still are blocking most of my outgoing Email. I can't even write to other Gmail addresses today. It actually looks like it might be time to DUMP GMAIL.

I downloaded a gmail archiver and backed-up all my mail last night as a precaution. Now, on to my own mail servers. You can rest assured that my corporate server will auto-reject gmail.com. I won't be screwed with either through malice or idiocy.

coincidence?

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/A0cOmJIugEU/0.jpg

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6151JD20100217

look similar?

I... must have this.

This is the only headstone I could possibly want. It must be made of carbon-fiber-laced stainless steel, and run on biofuel with solar igniters.

Only this could possibly summarize my life's work and goals, my attitude, and my sense of place in the universe. Oh, and the great-grandchildren can write something nice on it.

Warning. Do not click. NSFW.
http://oglaf.com/bliss.html

The Hosts to Avoid at ALL Costs...

You should never pay someone to "host" your website, but if for some reason you must... I want to help you avoid being totally ripped off and try to help you minimize the amount of cash you will be cheated out of.

With that in mind, some benign soul invented: http://www.nouptime.com/ which is the "worlds worst host, with ZERO uptime.

They also list the worst hosts, ever. Don't use any host listed here unless you like throwing away your money. No Uptime is fun to read, and is an extremely sarcastic, if somewhat TOO accurate portrayal of what most hosts will give you.

Nothing.

Why so little content?

There are good reasons why so many google blogs and other blogs have very little in the way of media or other content. Google will delete it.

Even when you're entirely acting legally, posting your own music or royalty-paid distributions you've obtained from the music label itself - your blog is now dead. As of today Google has shut down most music blogs.

This is part of why corporations can NEVER be trusted with content. Not even Google. To me, the big Gee is mostly useful for linking and advertising. I'm careful to keep as much content as possible firmly on my own servers.

No one can delete the content on my personal machines.

A perfectly functional aging server can be found online by searching "used servers under 100 dollars." I got three for 40 each. I already have one running Knoppix, and Sun's VirtualBox with minimalist linux/apache webservers installed. The knoppix OS runs off the CD, so it's unhackable! Virtual box utilizes hard drive and USB memory space for the virtual machines serving individual domains. Hack one domain, if possible, but the others are unaffected.

1. Host YOURSELF and pay NOTHING.
2. Get Google to do two things for you: Provide bandwidth and revenue.
3. Get a business license online for only 15.00.
4. Take that info to a Credit Union and get a business account for a 5.00 deposit.
5. Congratulations. You're now self-employed.

For twenty dollars I'll coach you on how to do these things, but if you already have the skills then you don't need my help.

Never forget the following rules for small business:
+Don't pay for anything you can do yourself.
+You don't need a bookkeeper. Businesses are often blackmailed by bookkeepers.
+You CAN do your own taxes, safely. No worry about prison.
+Never pay anyone to host your company. Provide your OWN hosting.
+Learn how to market yourself and your company.
+Provide a service or product, and be HONEST.

Microsoft will never stop lying.

Here we have a guy who once worked on OpenGl, and now works for the Evil Empire. Of course, he's talking a ten mile trail of sh*t about OpenGl now. The article is so bad, so logically flawed, as to be a comedy of technology. I laughed, winced, and ground my teeth at the derailment of logic in favor of greed.

So, another job-hungry tech guy got sucked up by Evil. It happens. Most of them are happy to just take the money and feed the family. Not this guy, he has to take aim at the community he learned from.

Microsoft has demonstrated repeatedly that they will absorb competition that they can't beat, sue those who can't be absorbed, and conduct a war of misinformation against the one thing that they can't buy off: Open Source.

20 years of government contracts, exclusive deals with colleges, lawsuits against competitors, closed-door deals with intel, the "Intel Tax" and the "MSFT Tax", being convicted of being a monopoly, and losing repeatedly in Europe for violating fair trade laws later - Microsoft still hasn't changed the way they do business:

Lie, Cheat, and Steal.

I have news for this guy, I used to work at the Evil Empire, and I spent my time advocating FOR open source and questioning why MSFT's own products do not interlock or even work together at all. Sure, they bought Word from one company, and Excel was ripped from another, but that's no reason that they can't be made to work together in the same suite after more than a decade.

Newsflash to the general public: After years of working with, and then for, Microsoft I have yet to find any software that is wholly written by MSFT. They buy everything. At most, they modify it slightly and rebrand it. MSFT is a marketing company - not a software company.

Programmers who once worked on a specific product at MSFT are now nowhere to be found, usually working in another company entirely, and I know of no case where someone still works in the same division after more than a few years. They move around rapidly. They have to, or the problems will catch up to them.

Problems? Coding around MSFT's odious restrictions, and being forced to release Alpha software to the public as stable. They do this by slapping programming band-aids on everything and calling lots of bugs "features under development."

To this day, MSFT is the proud owner of more security holes than all other software worldwide combined*. All. Think about that. MSFT doesn't have that much software. What they do have is swiss cheese.

*Gross estimate, lines of code are pretty hard to count in proprietary software -since you're not allowed to look at it or talk about it.




Actual article: Beware, hard to read without feeling ill if you work on open source.
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/mod/journal/journal.asp?jn=263140

Comic Review for 2009. Better stand back a bit...

I just can't put them in solid numerical order. Those near the top are better than those near the bottom. It's hard to even pick a top three. I have all sorts of points to grade on, but the trouble with web comics is that they are so vastly different. Some have pretty lame art but are amazingly funny, others have mind-blowing art and aren't funny at all. There's too many ranges to race up and down, and I've yet to figure out a good system to compare them all.

So, here they are, arranged in the purely subjective ranking of my random desires.

EXCELLENT:

Five stars
- Warning. Some adult content, or worse! [Which I love. Art should be independent of offensiveness.]

http://zebragirl.keenspot.com/
http://www.freakangels.com/
http://platinumgrit.com/
http://www.oglaf.com/
http://www.viruscomix.com/

Best:
Four stars

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/
http://schlockmercenary.com/index.html
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/
http://www.illwillpress.com/
http://www.baldwinpage.com/bruno.html

Very Good:
Three stars

http://www.errantstory.com/
http://sharingauniverse.comicgenesis.com/
http://jessemoynihan.com/
http://www.drunkduck.com/Charby_the_Vampirate/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/

Above Good:
Two stars

http://xkcd.com/
http://www.supermegatopia.com/comics.htm
http://www.megatokyo.com/
http://www.sabrina-online.com/
http://faith.rydia.net/101.html
http://www.poisonedminds.com/
http://www.choppingblock.org/
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

...
To be honest, there should probably be about twenty to thirty more links with 'one star' but I just have a hard time adding any of them. I have a huge list of bookmarks that I've read before, or still read, and none of them are begging me to add them.

They're "Okay", not "Good." I don't feel driven to sort them.

Complaints:

"What? Foglio on the last link? WTF?" Okay, no matter what you like, there's somebody who won't agree with you.

Personally, while I like Phil and have always loved his art, he's somewhat sexist in a backhanded way in my opinion. His art is phenomenal, but the stories fall flat. If I were editing a 2010 version of "Heavy Metal" magazine full of webcomics - I don't think I'd include Phil. The male characters are laughable, the females overblown, etc. And, it's just not that funny.

Freakangels is far more artistic, has a better story line, and is more amusing. I don't think I'd even like the author, given some of the expressed views therein, and the excessive use of violence to resolve issues, but still. I put it up there at #1 or damn close.

Zebragirl is just mind-blowing with art, story, and humor that keeps you begging for more. Don't start reading this one in the middle of cooking. You'll be burning the house down before you know it.

Virus Comics has a few comics, and all of them are awesome. I sat there reading while my tummy was growling for hours. Feed me! No. Feed me. Shut up! I didn't want to get up and eat until I'd finished the next storyline.

Platinum Grit is another mega-art dream of a comic. If I had wet dreams about comics, this would be it.

The others all have great things to be said about them, but the best thing you can do is just read them. Art is best supported by donating to the artist. Buy some of their junk and don't worry too much about my review. Send me a tee shirt if you care that much.

~D