Just a head's up that our testing of BootSkin and Windows XP SP2 shows that there is an odd problem.  After installing SP2, the first reboot afterwards may cause a blue screen (or other bad behavior). The second reboot seems to clear it up.  We are looking into what is causing this. It's harmless but if you're not prepared for it it is kind of scary.  We are looking into solutions but obviously many people won't necessarily have that download then.

BootSkin is a freeware program that enables you to change your Windows boot screen that works on Windows 2000, Windows XP and even the Longhorn beta. It is the ONLY program that changes your boot screen without patching the actual Windows kernel (if you've patched your kernel with one of the other programs you may need to restore to the default XP kernel prior to installing SP2 to be safe).

Nobody wants to admit their side makes mistakes in judgment.  Usually both sides in an argument share some part of the blame. But in my experience, one side usually has more of it shoulder than the other.

In terms of dealing with Iraq, it strikes me that the left has been the most cynical in dealing with the whole Iraq situation.  Some of you probably disagree and are prepared to hit the comment button and paste in Anti-Bush quote #2921 that you found on some website.

So let me put forth my case here and decide for yourself:

In 2000, Russia and France not only weren't interested in "letting the sanctions" do their work, they wanted them lifted.  They wanted Saddam's regime off the hook even though they had kicked the inspectors out in 1998 and were regularly shooting at US and British planes.

But they weren't alone.  The left was making powerful arguments that UN sanctions were killing 72,000 Iraqi children per year! The left was demanding removing the sanctions entirely because of the humanitarian cost.

So there were 3 realistic options:

(a) Keep the sanctions despite Russia and France's desire to lift them and the left's insistence than they were murdering thousands of innocent Iraqi's.

( Lift the sanctions on Iraq leaving Saddam free to do whatever.

(c) Remove Saddam and lift sanctions.

Now, if someone in 2000 said that you could remove Saddam and have a new Iraqi government with no sanctions within a year or so of work many people would have said that's optimistic to the extreme.  And if they said it could be done with fewer than 1,000 coalition and fewer than 15,000 Iraqi civilians killed total in the whole thing then that would have been considered misleading right-wing propaganda.

In fact, if some recall, the left was claiming such an intervention would likely cause half a MILLION Iraqi civilian casualties (I've got dozens of links from the time claiming the same thing).

But when the Bush administration started asserting that after 9/11, we needed to remove Saddam (argue WHY Bush wanted Saddam gone elsewhere, let's stick with the facts here) France and Russia started a new thing "Let the sanctions work." Huh? They wanted to lift the sanctions. Oh, I get it, let the sanctions work until the Americans elect a more reasonable President. Gotcha.

The left, meanwhile, argued that going into Iraq would cause half a million civilian casualties (sorry, wanted to use one more of these great links) so we shouldn't go in. Besides, the left argued, containment was good enough.  Containment would do the job. Containment? Wait a second, I thought the sanctions (now called containment) were killing 6,000 babies a month! We were starving the innocents. Now you're okay with this?

Of course, ultimately the US invaded.  And what was learned was shocking. First, it looks like there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq. At least, none that we've found. They may have been moved, they may still be hidden, or they may simply not exist.

Secondly, it turned out that France and Russia, you remember them right? The ones who wanted to lift sanctions? Turns out that they had secret agreements with Saddam for massively lucrative oil contracts.  Turned out someone's position about Iraq was about "the oillll". It just wasn't the US.

The third thing we learned is that 6,000 Iraqi babies weren't dying each month. That was just propaganda. Civilian deaths due to the sanctions are still not known but it's likely a figure close to 0.

Fourth, not that it matters given the third thing but it turned out that Saddam was taking that oil for food program and using it as his personal wallet. A billion in cash was found by US soldiers in canisters. Money siphoned off the oil for food program.  Of course, the palaces alone should make it clear to anyone that there was plenty of money available.

Fifth, instead of half a million casualties, there have been fewer than 15,000. Incidentally, I'm trying to use left-wing sites for most of my data, lest I be accused of being biased for the right on this. So I am using data that is intentionally biased the other way. I highly doubt 15,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed but if left-wingers will concede that only 15,000 have perished, that's fine since it's only 3% of the half million estimate they claimed.

And so here we are, in 2004. Iraq has a new government. Relative little damage was done to Iraq in removing Saddam and the sanctions are lifted.  But based on the behavior of the left, it's hard to conclude anything other than that they were pro-Saddam.  They wanted sanctions removed because they claimed 6,000 children died a month on it.  But if the choice was between 6,000 dying per month just from the sanctions (let alone the atrocities Saddam committed himself) or removing sanctions but Saddam had to go they preferred Saddam apparently. Even if the left really believed half a million would die in the invasion and occupation, that's only 7 years of casualties from "containment" of just small children let alone the tens of thousands Saddam was offing each year.

What gives?

So the left has a new strategy it seems, to try to deflect away from their own embarrassing errors, they focus on the one apparent mistake by the Bush administration: No WMD stockpiles found. The left didn't want to do anything constructive about Saddam (other than support him, sometimes outright) but they'll nitpick the WMD stockpiles and try to claim that THAT was why the US went in despite the people who favored going in never having made that a big issue (go ahead, there's plenty of right-wing sites on the net, go look at the articles written in 2002 and see how many even give a rip about WMD stockpiles

Sure, the links between the terrorist organizations and Iraq seem pretty solid according to the bipartisan senate report on the CIA (which slammed the CIA on pretty much everything else). 

And fine, the Kaye report stated found plenty of evidence of WMD programs existed. And that Saddam's strategy was: Wait for France and Russia to get the sanctions lifted and then go whole hog. 

But Bush said Iraq had X tons of mustard gas and you know, that was the real reason we went in.  Right? It has to be right because the left-wingers say it is and it's not like they've been wrong before...

Life rarely works out perfectly. But if events were put into a Choose your own Adventure and we had done what France and Russia wanted and lifted the sanctions on Saddam's Iraq OR we had done the US route which is remove Saddam and lift sanctions, which path do you think, 10 years from now, would yield better results?

If you go onto a website, or more specifically an Internet community and you find the admins to be evil and obnoxious or whatever, your best bet is to turn around and go away.  Believe me, I've learned this lesson the hard way over the years.

I've been on websites where the admins were just incredibly obnoxious and were in constant power trip mode. I am sure I must seem that way to some people too. Though I would describe myself more as apathetic than anything else. Which gets to my point:

There's no claims to being fair here. Joeuser is both a blog site and a community site.  If you just hang out on your own blog and write articles, you're pretty safe.  You can use the tools on JoeUser to keep people who bother you from even commenting on your articles.

But once you move off the reservation into the forums or other people's blogs, then you're fair game like everyone else (including me).  That said, we make no bones about fairness. The admins don't have to be fair. We don't claim to be fair. I've seen people seemingly go out of their way to antagonize me or Karmagirl or other admins on the site.  That's insane. We've only banned 4 people so far but we have been able to implement new features that allow us to take less drastic action.

Today's new access group is visitor.  Here's the situation: Someone has spent months building up their blog but on the forums they're obnoxious (and just so we're clear: obnoxious is defined as being obnoxious to an admin and admins do not have to justify what the term means).  Admins can set a user to have visitor access.  Visitor access isn't banning. But it confines them to their own blog. They can still write articles and comment on their own articles, but they can't comment on other people's articles (and be aware, when someone comments anonymously, on an admin screen it displays which user(s) have that IP or in that IP range with a couple more clicks).  This way, if we feel someone is a toxic user who is making the forums unpleasant we can remove them without them having to lose their blog and such. 

And of course, there is always the ability for someone to come back. A visitor can get put back to citizen and beyond. So it's not like being exiled. It's more like being confined to cool off a bit (though we anticipate most people who get put into visitor access will lose their tempers and just delete their blogs in a huff which is a fine solution as we then it's their decision not ours).

So hopefully this will help resolve some of the problems users have been complaining to us about.

As JoeUser.com heads towards being officially launched (probably in late August) I wanted to give you a preview of what's going on:

• Blog Navigator and Blog Navigator Pro.  We're going to make Blog Navigator Freeware and then create a Blog Navigator Pro (anyone who bought the regular one will automatically get the Pro version). 
• Blog Navigator Pro. This program has all the features of Blog Navigator plus some extras (more search capabilities for example) along with the ability to post your own blogs. This is, IMO, a killer feature. I was playing with that in a beta last night. It makes it as easy (and fast) to write your own blog as it is to write it up in say Microsoft Word and press the save button.  Formatting and all that good stuff is built in.
• Premium Accounts. Premium accounts will cost $19.95 plus $2.99 per month (as you'll get Blog Navigator Pro with it).  This will give you 10MB of disk space, blog backup features (i.e. easily download your blog for archiving or for sending it out to other people via email and such). Another side issue is that additional options become available for admins which I'll talk about below.
• Isolate Feature. Right now, if someone is really antagonizing one of the admins, our options are limited.  We're not willing to have to deal with someone who's being obnoxious to us on a personal levle but we don't want to kick them off the site.  If they're a premium user, the isolate feature comes up which would contain that user to their own blog.  We don't expect to use that much (we've only banned 4 users in the entire time JoeUser.com has existed so far) but it's still comforting.
• Suppress User. If your'e a premium user, we'll eventually have the option for you to able to make a user go away. I.e. if User X is really getting on your nerves, you will be add them to a suppress list and you simply won't see their stuff anymore.  We can't add this in the free version as it takes considerable CPU bandwidth to actually do this so we wouldn't want millions of users having this unless we had millions of dollars to pay for additonal machines!
• More Templates. Once we have WinCustomize.com's v4 done, we hope to apply some of the technology here to have a lot more choices for how your blog looks and feels.
• .NET updates.  We hope to upgrade key parts of JoeUser to .NET where we can make use of its hypercaching which should greatly improve apparent speed.
• Referral Leaderboard. We hope to soon have a feature that will show which bloggers have the most sites linking into them. One measure of general public awareness is how many sites link to your site as a source of information. The more sites that do that, the more widely read your site is.

Stay tuned! Have fun!

DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years at the latest, Microsoft boss and founder Bill Gates predicted. Asked what home entertainment would like in the future, Gates said that DVD technology would be "obsolete in 10 years at the latest. If you consider that nowadays we have to carry around film and music on little silver discs and stick them in the computer, it's ridiculous," Gates said in comments reproduced in German in the mass-circulation daily Bild. "These things can scratch or simply get lost."

 

Just so you know, there's going to be some pain when Windows XP SP2 comes out.

For some reason, reasons we don't know, the FIRST time you reboot XP SP2 when it comes out BootSkin will likely cause a blue screen of death. The SECOND time you restart (after the blue screen) it should be fine. We're looking into the cause, it's pretty bizarre that it would do that (i.e. why one time but recover on its own after that?). But some people will be affected by it.

I've been having a ball with ObjectDock Plus. I've got 4 different docks going on my desktop but you can barely tell because I have itty bitty tabs  on 3 of them.  The 4th dock I don't have docked to an edge but instead I have it activate when I put my mouse to the very bottom. The biggest glitch I've run into with it is that I can't drag and drop links to a dock (well I can but they don't work).  What I want to do is have my "favorite" websites as a series of tiny tabs over on the left edge of my screen.  I mostly use Keyboard LaunchPad for getting around my sites (Ctrl-Alt-1 for WinCustomize, 2 for Joeuser.com, 3 for Stardock, 4 for Neowin, and so forth).  But what I want to use the docks for is more "temporary" favorite websites. Ones that I want to check out later when I have more time but know I'll forget but don't want to have permanently in my "favorites" list.

BTW, if you've got a particularly clever ObjectDock Plus setup, take a screenshot and upload it and I'll try to feature some of them in my next WC blog. 

One thing that ObjectDock Plus's availability has brought forward is an issue that affects most shareware developers and that is pricing.  Go to a shareware conference or just hang out with other shareware authors and the topic is sure to come up: Why does the same guy who happily pays $8 to watch "White Chicks" and spend $4 on pop corn or $18 on two pizzas turn around and bitch about paying $15 to $20 for a software product that took an immense amount of effort to create that they'll be able to make use of for years?

What bugged me the most was the idea that because we have had ObjectDock (freeware) available that we somehow have no right to make a plus version.  That somehow we're the greedy ones for wanting to be compensated for years of effort.  Rather than being thankful that we make a free program like ObjectDock used by hundreds of thousands of people, one that we continue to update for free, we get guff for putting out a Plus version.

There were also the people who felt ObjectDock should be part of Object Desktop. I could at least, philosophically, understand where they were coming from. I'm not sure at what point Object Desktop came to equal "All of Stardock's stuff in a single package for $50".  But my view is, anyone who's paid us $50 for Object Desktop is a customer and we're going to listen to their view point a lot more seriously than the kid who's never contributed anything back but feels entitled to call us greedy for making ObjectDock Plus. 

The reason ObjectDock Plus isn't part of Object Desktop is very straight forward: Economics.   Object Desktop has something like a dozen and a half programs in it. For $50. And most of these programs are really quite powerful.. I could go on for hours about how DesktopX should be a $100 product on its own given the things it can do for corporations but we target power users and consumers instead so we have to price it appropriately.  The bottom line is that Object Desktop is a really really good deal.  And it's such a good deal that it's very tough to sustain it even as is at the price it is. 

Personally, and correct me if I'm mistaken, I think half the coolness of Object Desktop is that many of the components get very frequent updates.  If you bought Object Desktop in say 1999, the main components in it have continually been updated in it year after year after year with more components being added over time.  I don't want to name specific products but I suggest checking out other desktop enhancement programs that have come out during that time and note how often they've been updated (or heck, when the last time they were updated).  Meanwhile, we've been cranking on DesktopX, WindowBlinds, WindowFX, IconPackager, and other pieces on a regular basis year after year after year. Heck, wait till you see ObjectBar 2.  And we're working on some other cool new things too. Point being, this coolness is only possible as long as Object Desktop is economically viable. It's not like we're driving around in Porsches or something. Things that don't remain viable end up fading away.

I think at the end of the day the question is simply are people glad we made ObjectDock Plus? Based on the reaction we're seeing, we think yes. If it hadn't been released the way it is, it would never have been made.

Speaking of new stuff, later this Fall we hope to finally come out with the beta of ThinkDesk. This is an entirely new suite of products. Where Object Desktop is about extending your desktop, ThinkDesk is about managing your information.  Pricing will be the same as Object Desktop (though unlike Object Desktop the price will probably go up once it leaves beta). It'll be XP only and we'll be focusing a lot of energy on .NET features.

Meanwhile in Italy, UK, and US where the distributed DesktopX team works, version 2.2 is nearly done.  I think a new beta of it showed up on Object Desktop tonight along with IconX which is now separate (but if you have both installed, the IconX tab will show up in DesktopX). We learned from that WinCustomize poll that lots of people had no idea what IconX was. That needs to change as it's (in my biased opinion) one of the coolest programs on Windows.

So that's all for now. Gotta re-setup my crashed laptop. It's running plain Luna right now! Eeew!

I am what you would call an undecided voter.  But it's really more complicated than that since the choice for me isn't whether I would vote for Bush or Kerry but rather will I vote for Bush or not.  There is no way I'll vote for Kerry.  But that doesn't mean I'm willing to vote for Bush.  Unlike many neophyte ideologues, I don't imagine the end of the world coming simply because the "other guy" gets elected. Therefore, the side I tend to be more sympathetic to doesn't automatically get my vote.

I've read on-line where people think I'm some sort of Bush supporter simply because I support the war in Iraq/Afghanistan.  That's not the case.  I do find a great deal of amusement seeing the way Bush somehow turns his left-wing opponents into raving lunatics. Never in my lifetime have I seen the opposing party of someone become so hysterical. Most Americans are fairly ignorant on US history, what makes the left unique is that they try to claim an intellectual high ground even as they demonstrate their complete ignorance.  To history buffs, the spazzing about whether we should have gone into Iraq or not comes across as bizarre.  Just to recap, here is a link to a list of wars the US has been in and why we went in.

My two favorites have to be the Mexican American war, where we conquered Mexico (culminating with the capture of Mexico City) on the justification that we really really wanted their land. At least things were more straight forward back then. But the best one of all has to be the US war against Spain in 1898 where we declared war on Spain because one of our ships in Havana harbor blew up (turned out it was due to an accident on the ship).  That's it. That was the justification. Over 2,000 Americans died in that "war" and that was over a century ago when the US population was much smaller. No hysteria then. No anti-war protesters. No calls for impeachment. No international condemnation.

So seeing melodramatic articles about Bush and "casualties in Iraq" asserting that Bush is the worst President in US history or that he should be impeached or whatever just strike me as evidence that George W. Bush has a super power: He makes left wingers look nuts.

But like I said, having a low opinion of hysterical left wing rantings doesn't automatically make me a Bush fan. So let me tell you the problems I have with Bush:

1) Economic irresponsibility.  I really don't like deficit spending. I can live with it as long as I feel like the government is taking its spending seriously. But the pork has been record breaking.  Huge farm subsidies, huge increases in spending for both the EPA and dept of health and human services show that a) He doesn't take spending seriously and He's politically naive. Even at the time I was shaking my head knowing that even with these increases he wouldn't gain anything since Republicans automatically get tarred for being anti-poor and anti-environment regardless of the facts.

2) Incredibly inarticulate.  Every time he holds a press conference I cringe. I keep waiting for him to say something stupid. "Given the choice between trusting a mad man or defending America I will choose to defend America every single time!"  Ack. Who writes this stuff? You may not like Clinton but his intelligence was apparent and he really understood many of these issues even if he didn't do what I would have liked him to do.  Is it really asking so much to have a President who behaves as if he has a clue? Look at Tony Blair, regardless of what you think about him, he comes across as supremely knowledgeable.

3) Messing with the constitution. If the choice boils down to accepting gay marriage or messing with the constitution I'll choose to accept gay marriage. It makes me think that Bush is the same kind of fanatic who would have pushed through the prohibition amendments.  The constitution isn't a political toy. It's the closest thing I have to a secular religion. Don't screw with it over something pidly like this.  And yes, I'm aware of the full faith and service clause.

4) Crazy Projects.  What the hell was the whole Mission to Mars thing about? Here we're running record deficits and he's talking about going to Mars? Meanwhile, he proposes killing the Hubble Space telescope. Hello?

5) Afraid of leveling with us.  All the spastic left wingers who are, to some degree of success, able to retroactively claim that we went into Iraq to confiscate stockpiles of WMD would never be able to make that case if Bush had been more clear about why we went in.  We went in because a) We believed (correctly) that Saddam had WMD PROGRAMS (not stockpiles). That he was a declared enemy of the US in a region where we could no longer tolerate one and c) After 9/11, there was no way we were going to let Saddam stay in place to wait out the sanctions.  But Bush made a great deal of noise about nerve gas and other things. Nobody who supported the war gave a crap about chemical weapons.  We wanted Saddam gone because after 9/11 we could imagine very plausible scenarios where 5 to 10 years down the line in a post-sanctions Iraq that Saddam would either be practicing nuclear blackmail or covertly supplying terrorists with WMDs.  I didn't want my children having to deal with that.  But Bush, because of issue #2, couldn't manage to coherently put that together leaving a gaping hole for the leftbots to spew their latest reason for being against the war (because, you know, they would have been totally for going in if we had found mustard gas stockpiles in Iraq...NOT).

6) Totally incompetent post-war handling in Iraq. I don't care if it was Bremer's decision to decommission Iraq's army. It was still incredibly foolish. How does someone with such a basic management failing get into that position in the first place? If you walk into a corporation that needs to be rebuilt, you don't fire everyone and rehire from scratch. You reorganize it. This isn't complicated stuff.

The whole occupation was poorly run from start to finish. From a PR point of view, US troops should have totally secured Baghdad even if the hinterlands were less secure.  Want proof? Do you think Afghanistan is some sort of cosmopolitan land of peace now? Of course not. But the occupation has seemed a lot more successful because Kabul, where all the press are, is reasonably secure.  If you listen to the news, you'd think Iraq was some bloody quagmire.  As of June 21, we've lost 619 soldiers due to combat.  That includes the actual war and the subsequent year + occupation. In that time, nearly as many people in Washington D.C. have been murdered.  That doesn't make things any less tragic but Iraq isn't particularly bloody. 

But because reporters have seen so much violence because the Bush administration hasn't locked down Baghdad this perception has been allowed to grow. Sorry but if you can't control elementary perception, you're too inept to be President.

7) I'm not sure where he's hoping to go next.  What's the plan? War on terror? What next? Domestic policy? Whatcha gonna do?

So there's 7 reasons off the top of my head that Bush needs to deal with before I'll vote for him.  If he doesn't make a good on some of these, he won't get my vote.  I'll either vote for a minor candidate or not at all.  I know quite a few people in that boat with me and the result has been Kerry's gradual lead as mixed ideologists such as me, who are generally more sympathetic to Republicans than Democrats, migrate off the reservation.

Next: Why Kerry won't get my vote.

I've been having a ball with ObjectDock Plus. I've got 4 different docks going on my desktop but you can barely tell because I have itty bitty tabs  on 3 of them.  The 4th dock I don't have docked to an edge but instead I have it activate when I put my mouse to the very bottom. The biggest glitch I've run into with it is that I can't drag and drop links to a dock (well I can but they don't work).  What I want to do is have my "favorite" websites as a series of tiny tabs over on the left edge of my screen.  I mostly use Keyboard LaunchPad for getting around my sites (Ctrl-Alt-1 for WinCustomize, 2 for Joeuser.com, 3 for Stardock, 4 for Neowin, and so forth).  But what I want to use the docks for is more "temporary" favorite websites. Ones that I want to check out later when I have more time but know I'll forget but don't want to have permanently in my "favorites" list.

BTW, if you've got a particularly clever ObjectDock Plus setup, take a screenshot and upload it and I'll try to feature some of them in my next WC blog. 

One thing that ObjectDock Plus's availability has brought forward is an issue that affects most shareware developers and that is pricing.  Go to a shareware conference or just hang out with other shareware authors and the topic is sure to come up: Why does the same guy who happily pays $8 to watch "White Chicks" and spend $4 on pop corn or $18 on two pizzas turn around and bitch about paying $15 to $20 for a software product that took an immense amount of effort to create that they'll be able to make use of for years?

What bugged me the most was the idea that because we have had ObjectDock (freeware) available that we somehow have no right to make a plus version.  That somehow we're the greedy ones for wanting to be compensated for years of effort.  Rather than being thankful that we make a free program like ObjectDock used by hundreds of thousands of people, one that we continue to update for free, we get guff for putting out a Plus version.

There were also the people who felt ObjectDock should be part of Object Desktop. I could at least, philosophically, understand where they were coming from. I'm not sure at what point Object Desktop came to equal "All of Stardock's stuff in a single package for $50".  But my view is, anyone who's paid us $50 for Object Desktop is a customer and we're going to listen to their view point a lot more seriously than the kid who's never contributed anything back but feels entitled to call us greedy for making ObjectDock Plus. 

The reason ObjectDock Plus isn't part of Object Desktop is very straight forward: Economics.   Object Desktop has something like a dozen and a half programs in it. For $50. And most of these programs are really quite powerful.. I could go on for hours about how DesktopX should be a $100 product on its own given the things it can do for corporations but we target power users and consumers instead so we have to price it appropriately.  The bottom line is that Object Desktop is a really really good deal.  And it's such a good deal that it's very tough to sustain it even as is at the price it is. 

Personally, and correct me if I'm mistaken, I think half the coolness of Object Desktop is that many of the components get very frequent updates.  If you bought Object Desktop in say 1999, the main components in it have continually been updated in it year after year after year with more components being added over time.  I don't want to name specific products but I suggest checking out other desktop enhancement programs that have come out during that time and note how often they've been updated (or heck, when the last time they were updated).  Meanwhile, we've been cranking on DesktopX, WindowBlinds, WindowFX, IconPackager, and other pieces on a regular basis year after year after year. Heck, wait till you see ObjectBar 2.  And we're working on some other cool new things too. Point being, this coolness is only possible as long as Object Desktop is economically viable. It's not like we're driving around in Porsches or something. Things that don't remain viable end up fading away.

I think at the end of the day the question is simply are people glad we made ObjectDock Plus? Based on the reaction we're seeing, we think yes. If it hadn't been released the way it is, it would never have been made.

Speaking of new stuff, later this Fall we hope to finally come out with the beta of ThinkDesk. This is an entirely new suite of products. Where Object Desktop is about extending your desktop, ThinkDesk is about managing your information.  Pricing will be the same as Object Desktop (though unlike Object Desktop the price will probably go up once it leaves beta). It'll be XP only and we'll be focusing a lot of energy on .NET features.

Meanwhile in Italy, UK, and US where the distributed DesktopX team works, version 2.2 is nearly done.  I think a new beta of it showed up on Object Desktop tonight along with IconX which is now separate (but if you have both installed, the IconX tab will show up in DesktopX). We learned from that WinCustomize poll that lots of people had no idea what IconX was. That needs to change as it's (in my biased opinion) one of the coolest programs on Windows.

So that's all for now. Gotta re-setup my crashed laptop. It's running plain Luna right now! Eeew!

Got this in email today...

Subject: Social Security

When Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security

(FICA) Program. He promised:

1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary.

2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first

$1,400 of their annual incomes into the Program.

3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program

would be deductible from their income tax each year.

4.) That the money the participants put into the independent "Trust

Fund" rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, would

only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other

Government program, and,

5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income. Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to "put away,"

you may be interested in the following:

Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the independent

"Trust" fund and put it into the General fund so that Congress could spend

it?

A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the Democratically-controlled House and Senate.

Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax deduction for

Social Security (FICA) withholding?

A: The Democratic Party.

Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?

A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the "tie-breaking"

deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of

the U.S.

Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving annuity payments to immigrants?

A: That's right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this county, and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!

Then, after doing all this lying and thieving and violation of the Original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away!

And the worst part about it is, uninformed citizens believe it!

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions during this 2004 election year!

If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe good changes will evolve.

How many people can YOU send this to?

Keep this going clear up through the 2004 election!! We need to be heard.!!