General, Politics, Tech

From the “Do No Evil” Dept.

Can I just say that Google sucks
To bad they’ve forgotten point #6 of their philosophy.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

..and, no, I won’t link to them, and I use Jeeves as my default search engine.
I really can’t believe that they think that this is a good move for their stockholders/business. Is the business they do in China enough so that all the flack they’ll get from this is worth it? Can you really trust any search you do using Google? (Can you trust searches you do from any other search engine?) This is a whole giant can of worms on trusting that results of searches are not censored, or compromised in any way. Google thinks of themselves as gatekeepers of the flow of information (or, atleast to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”) on the internet–who watches the gatekeepers?

General, Politics

From the Ben Franklin lives department

Hurrah!!! for students at Georgetown Univesity who turned their backs on Alberto Gonzales (*affectionately* known as the Inquistitor around here) and holding up a banner quoting Ben Franklin, to protest his speech defending the President’s domestic spying program.

GU Protest

Mainstream news sources are reporting “more” than a dozen protestors (looks like most reports came from the same wire service report.), some didn’t even mention it. Non-mainstream sources (Hammeroftruth) report up to 26 (including the 4 in black hoods holding the banner). I say any amount is good–the more the merrier.
It’s good to see that some law students remember what the Constitution is.

Tech

Windows vs Linux :D

For those who think that Windows is easier to “install” than Linux read about what it tkaes to get a new laptop where you want it here: http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/20051231T204200.html
For those who think windows handles wireless better than linux:

Get the wireless to work. Windows won’t find my wireless network, but the Intel software does. Whatever

While this isn’t a complete virgin install of Windows, it points out how much work actually goes into setting up a new computer, even with Windows pre-installed. 😀

General, Politics

Redistributing wealth upwards?

I didn’t link to Wil Wheaton’s first post in this saga, because nothing interested me out of the ordinary. But this post did interest me because of one sentence/quote:

W: So redistribution of wealth downward is bad, but redistribution of wealth upward is good?

My question is, “How do you redistribute wealth upwards“?
The easy answer is that you can’t. There are other answers though, like corporate welfare.
I’d like to go on record as saying that both forms of “welfare” are wrong. Morally wrong–let’s call it what it is. Theft. At the point of a gun. It doesn’t matter who you take the money from–rich or poor–if that person has earned that money, you are stealing it from them, taking their money to do what someone else deems to be “important”. If I did that as an individual, I’d be thrown in jail, why does it make it right if a collective does it?

As an addendum, this here post of mine doesn’t really have anything to do with what Wil is talking about in his posts, and I apologize for that, and hope that everyone reads Wil’s posts in their entirety.

Politics

Time to Impeach Pres. Bush?

That’s really not question. I think that it really is time, with the NSA domestic spying news, and the president admitting to ordering the felonious acts.
Domestic spying against US citizens, wiretaps without warrants is illegal–a felony.
With the president admitting to this, and, also, saying that he will continue to do it, I’d say it’s time to show him that he’s not above the law, and to impeach him. (They impeached Clinton for sexual hanky-panky, don’t you think that this is more serious, than that?)
More facts on this can be seen here: http://cryptome.org/small-call.htm
If we don’t bring this president to task for this, and show him that no person in the US is above the law, then we will surely become a dictatorship, sooner than later.

Art, Tech

Gimp 1oth Anniversary

Well The Gimp is having it’s tenth anniversary. Just in time for the release of Gimp 2.2.10. And they’re having a SplashScreen Contest. I entered twice, you can see the entries below:
Rose-Splash

Cubist-Splash
The Gimp is an Open Source project that doesn’t sucktm. It has many good qualities, and some that aren’t good (I really hate the UI–as do many people, more about that some other time.)
As a replacement for Photoshop it is lacking in some areas (the, afore-mentioned, UI, gif animation, image map slicing, and CMYK color management), and excels in others (scriptability, extensibility, portability–you can use it on Unix, Mac, and Windows, and price–free as in freedom, and beer.)
Rock on Wilber!

Tech

Closed source fanatics?

Wow! I knew that there were Open Source Fanaticstm, (see just about any thread at Slashdot, but Closed Source Fanatics? That’s a link to an Opera discussion forums’ thread about open sourcing Opera.
Interesting how many people think that all OSS is bloated, and that anyone can just add code willy-nilly, which isn’t really true. I mean you can do that, if you want, for your own puposes, but most projects have a pretty formalized patching system (esp. the Linux Kernel ), so that isn’t a big problem.
Bloat isn’t either a OSS, or CSS, featue, it’s comes from bad sofware engineering, and it can happen in either closed or open source developing.
Opera is a fine browser, and I use it myself, but not as my default, right now, although I did until I found Firefox, back when I still used Windows. I must say that with Firefox being so slow on Ubuntu that I’m thinking about changing that. I’m hoping that the 1.5 release of Firefox will change that, and that it’ll get into Ubuntu sooner, rather than later, because I do love it for more reasons than it being OSS.
Well there are advantages to both OS and propriorty developing–I think that there are more advantages on the OS side, –and I use both types of software, because I use the best software that I can find on the system that I use, and , because that’s what freedom is all about.

Tech

Search alternatives

So Google is the Monster of all search engines, and it bugs me. Not just that it has become so big and influential (although that’s part of it), but for other reasons, like their collusion with the Chinese government, and privacy issues. I’m trying to find an alternative that is just as good–for me–but am having difficulties.
I won’t use Yahoo!, for basically the same reasons. I think that they are even more active in their collusion with the Chinese government, having actively turned in dissidents.
I’ve been using AskJeeves, but, am not completely satisfied with it. One reason is the relevance of the searches. I compared a search with Google from my search bar in Firefox and Google came up with the actual document I was looking for as the second link, where Ask got it as the tenth link. Not a major difference, I know, (and they both should have got it as the first link, in a perfect world), but still a pretty good one.
As it stands now, I’m gonna stick with AskJeeves as my default search engine, if anyone can think of a better one that I haven’t tried let me know in comments.