There's a mind-numbingly obvious solution to your problem here.

Become a customer.

It's very simple. Sign up and start paying for the services. I'm highly dependent on Google services, I run my whole business off them. It was an unacceptable risk to me to be locked out, or not have customer support, so I simply signed up and started paying for it.

For $5 per month, I have a phone number to call if anything goes wrong, and real customer support: http://contact.googleapps.com/?&rd=1

The wonderful thing about a free society is that no one works by force (unlike statist governements).

If a consenting adult chooses to engage in a mutually beneficial contract and sell his time and service to another for an agreed upon compensation, that hardly fits your example of "capitalists have the right to the lions share of the fruits of others' labor".

The fact that a voluntary system of rewards, employment, creation, production and business opportunity is a superior system to leftist/statist "work for the common good" scheme should be obvious to anyone that can read English - because those that can read English should have read Animal Farm at some point.

This is a common misunderstanding/misperception. The Libertarians vehemently oppose corporate welfare and public/private partnerships. What you're calling "pro-corporate" is really not true - they believe that in general, the market should be left alone, regulation minimized and clear separation between companies and government should exist. They are deeply suspicious of things like the military-industrial complex.

The Libertarians believe that a person has a right to the fruit of their own labors, and that people should be free from burdensome regulation and oppressive government manipulation of markets. This is not "pro corporate" this is "pro human". They also believe that just as a person should be free to succeed, they should be free to fail. The libertarians are passionately opposed to "bail outs" and "stimulus" government corporate welfare programs.

Any Libertarian who tried to pull the sort of shenanigans that we're seeing here would be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail by his/her own party.

Yes indeed, and I'm glad. I'd rather see an ad for something I'm interested in than constant True.com or e-harmony adds.

The internet as I know it starts with the Google home page. And yes, I was there during the 1200 baud dial-up BBS days. Or are you saying you prefer Bing? Are you honestly going to tell me that we are worse off now that we have a universe of information at our fingertips than we were back in the IRC days? Really?

Steal my privacy? Hardly. When I walk into the Home Depot and ask the cashier where I can find a garden hose, he tells me, and also suggests some other products I might be interested in since I'm there looking for a garden hose. I'm really happy he does. Well, damn, I guess he just "stole my privacy". I suppose it would be better for me to have to wander every aisle and manually check every product until I can find it huh?

I can talk to my phone and say "What's the population of Isreal?" and my freaking phone will answer me. With citations. And for this mind blowing ability, the cost I must pay is to see advertisements that I'm interested in? We're living in a unimaginable universe that even the authors of Star Trek couldn't envision - and for that phenomenal access to the collective intelligence of mankind, I get unobtrusive suggestions for products that might help me out. And your answer to this is "Google must be stopped?" What the hell?

How about, "Thanks Google. Thanks for being a large part of making the world into a Sci-Fi fantasy. And by the way, thanks for doing it in a really ethical way. We see you, and we appreciate you."

As Bastiat pointed out so eloquently in That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen your $800 per month is what is seen.

What is not seen, is the $800 per month that this no longer costs your neighbors.

All government spending is not evil, and all public works aren't bad. But it is a mistake, a fallacy, to think that taking $800 per month from your neighbors so you can spend it is somehow good for the economy, or your neighbors.

When we must engage in public works, we should do so - hold our nose and accept the necessary evil. This, however, should never be mistaken for economic activity. That is an illusion.

It is worth taking a hard, critical look at yourself and what it is you do. Is your job really justified? Maybe so, perhaps you are a civil engineer or water treatment specialist, I have no way of knowing. Only your conscience can guide you when you wake up in the morning and greet your struggling neighbors, look them in the eye, and know that they are paying for you to do what you do.

Have you actually used KDE recently? The reason I ask is because I hadn't. I had it in my mind, like you, that it was basically a windows clone desktop (because that's how it used to be). Recently, Unity on Ubuntu annoyed me enough that I installed Kubuntu. I have to tell you, I was blown away. Modern KDE is nothing like windows. It's stunning, really - quite amazing, and has some great paradigms that I haven't seen in any other OS, like actually making the desktop area useful.

Navigating to apps etc.. is pretty awesome. Every time I boot it up I'm just struck by how beautiful it is, I really don't understand how Apple gets all this "beauty" cred. To me, it looks like a turd compared to KDE. It's in the eye of the beholder, I guess - but if you haven't tried it recently, I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Thanks, and actually I added the quotes for exactly that reason. The left, like the right, has many different viewpoints (many of which I passionately agree with), so in an attempt to emphasis the generic nature of my argument I added the quotes. The "left" is a bad label, as is the "right" but for lack of better terms or many pages of explanation of the complex and rich philosophy and history of both "sides", I used the generically accepted labels, but tried to qualify them with quotes to emphasize the fact that they were just labels. Sorry if I didn't communicate that well.

A lot of people are confused about how this sort of law could be passed in Texas, which according to left-wing groupthink is a regressive bible-thumping gun-toting desert filled with rednecks who hate Darwin and force kids to pray in school.

This, of course, is nonsense. Much of the anti-Texas sentiment results from fundamental ideological differences that go to the core of the "left" versus "right" arguments.

Texans, for very valid historical reasons, have a deep seated mistrust of centralized government and authority. This can be seen in pretty much every part of our culture, especially our constitution and court systems. This way of thinking, of course, is a direct attack on everything that those on the "left" believe in. Even worse, the evidence clearly shows that our way of governing and beliefs work very well - from tort reform, to right to work, to zero income tax (just to name a few) we have a state that cherishes individual liberty, resists government interference, and we have one of the best economies in the world to show for it.

The success of Texas is a sore tooth to those on the "left". As a result, they are forced to rely on ad-hominem attacks and mischaracterization in a defensive attempt to protect and justify their beliefs, even though even casual comparisons of the success of cities and states that implement those beliefs shows that they are clearly misguided.

The fact is, disturbing as it may seem to those on the "left", Texas is beautiful, tolerant, friendly and a wonderful place to live. I moved my family here from the east coast seven years ago, and it was one of the best decisions we've ever made.

This law is just another example (among many) of Texas following in its long tradition of codifying individual rights and protecting liberties. Yes, Texas has some black marks in it's history - but show me a state (or country) that doesn't!

There is a reason why people from all over the country are flooding here, and why we gained four seats in the house in 2010. As much vitriol, misrepresentation and flat out lying that those on the "left" do about Texas, the truth is becoming more and more evident to those around the country, that just as once the United States was the place that people fled to in order to escape oppressive government, now Texas has become a safe haven within the U.S. for the same reasons.

Please go read Bastiat: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html it will do you a lot of good intellectually.

While there are many things about python that I love (array slicing, list comprehensions, etc...) the lack of anonymous in-lines really kills it for me. I enjoy working with python, and for certain apps python/django is a clear win - but these days I find myself mostly slinging nodejs code.

There are two ways you can tackle this:

1) You just want to make cool things, but don't really care about the details
2) You really want to grok this stuff, and want to build stuff from scratch

This is roughly equivalent, in programmers terms, of learning a high-level language like .Net, PHP, Python etc... versus assembly/C.

Do you want to Just Make It Work(tm) without understanding the underlying libraries/platform? Or do you want to be able to build the libraries/platform?

For option 1, the Arduino is fantastic, and really can't be beat. For option 2, I'd say start with an 8 bit AVR, like AT tiny, grab a breadboard, come LEDs and a programmer, and pull your hair out until it starts making sense and the lights flash in the pattern you expect.

I took the second route, and have been very happy with my choice. Now, if (at my option) I just want to do something quick and dirty, I can grab an arduino and prototype something fast. But the thing is, I'm not constrained by that. I'm able to throw things together on a breadboard from components in a tray. I can write the code in straight C (or avr asm), and really grok the ISRs.

It's kind of like Processing (the platform for data visualization and artistic CG). Would you rather make fast animations that look great, are easy to make, but only run in the Processing environment? Or would you rather build your own cross platform UI stack and then create your own highly optimized animations?

I don't really agree with the "beginners" attitude towards Arduino, the same way I don't agree that Python is a good language for "beginner" programmers. We become programmers or amateur EE's for some reason - to solve some problem. If the problem you want to solve is that you want to be an expert developer, then don't start with python, start with c or asm. If you just have stuff you need to get done, python is great.

Same with EE, don't start with Arduino if your purpose is to really learn the stuff. You'll just be confused by the toolchain and helpful libraries.

I'm doing some fun stuff with chains js, an experimental library I've been working on to make async javascript look/feel more synchronous.

Massive scalability through distributed computing?

Ask the guys at SETI why it shouldn't all be done on centralized servers.

Not sure if you're being purposefully obtuse, or trolling, but in case you're serious - there are a fantastically wide range of applications that benefit from massive parallelism found in shader languages like GLSL. Just take a look at some of the books on amazon that have CUDA implementations for everything from fluid simulation to computer vision stuff.

Most recently I've been playing with the concept of doing sound synth and processing on the GPU with shaders in js.

In my original post I mentioned that WebGL isn't just for graphics. There are enormous benefits to being able to execute massively parallel operations on a web page.

Honestly, isn't not just for graphics - it's for the whole fantastic class of problems that can be solved via GLSL shaders - GPU accelerated calculations in JS - this is simply so amazingly powerful, IE 10 is essentially worthless without it.

As people start doing high performance computing and solving wildly complex problems in the browser with GPU accelerated JS, the browser will continue to emerge as the platform of choice for a wonderfully wide range of applications. IE will sit off to the side, largely ignored (except for certain "enterprise" business users) and will become even more irrelevant.

I'd expect to start seeing more and more web sites that want to do these things refuse to support IE at all, the shims and plugins just aren't worth screwing with.