Sentience and sovereignty are two distinct qualities, and it’s possible to have both, neither, or one without the other.

Sentience is awareness or consciousness, but not necessarily self-awareness. Since English is a human construct, an entity (life form, virus, or machine) is only sentient if it can declare its sentience to humanity in a deterministic and human-understandable way, or in a way distinguishable by machines created by humans, while said entity itself is NOT created by humans, but rather God, space aliens, evolution, devolution, or inexplicable natural or supernatural processes.

Sovereignty is the quality of having relative supremacy of authority or rule, such as that exercised by a monarch or sovereign state. Obviously, it’s impossible to have absolute supremacy of authority or rule, at a higher level, because of the laws of Florida, the United States, or whatever State you live in, at a middle level, because of whatever earthly commitments you’ve made (i.e. if you live with your parents you have to follow their rules, or if you have a landlord you have to follow his rules, or if you work for a company you have to follow company policy), at a lower level, because of whatever circumstances you were born into (1st world or 3rd world country, family, etc.) or what decisions were or are being made for you by others, at an even lower level, the constraints of your physical body, and at the lowest level, the laws of time, physics, and the universe. However, this does not make sovereignty a fuzzy concept, though it is an emotional one.

An ant crawling around your house is sovereign, but an ant in an ant farm or science project is not sovereign, because its environment has been created explicitly for it by humans without the ant declaring that he or she or …

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Yesterday at 22:59 GMT, I received this email from no-reply@amazon.com:

Hello,

It has come to our attention that you are framing our Web site with the domain, th8.us. This activity is prohibited by the terms of the Operating Agreement which states that Associates cannot frame any part of the Amazon site within their site(s). You can review the complete terms of the Associates Program Operating Agreement and Participation Requirements by following this link:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement

http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating/participation

As a result of this activity, your Associates account has been closed and payment of advertising fees has been withheld. Any other accounts you may have or may open in the future which are found in violation of the Operating Agreement terms will be closed and advertising fees withheld without notification.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Andy - Associates Account Specialist
http://www.amazon.com

Anyway, this puts me in the untenable position of having no revenue to finance my online operations. After being banned from Google AdSense in Nov. 2010, I never received my final owed payment of $566 (because Google always cheats its 1099-contractors out of their final owed payment), nor will I be receiving my final owed payment of $480 from Amazon Associates.

At the peak of my institution of ads on the Th8.us URL shortener, I had it alternate every hour between Google ads and my Amazon affiliate link. I thought it was pretty ingenious:

if(preg_match(”/^[0-9a-zA-Z_-]{1,62}$/”, $i)) {db_connect();
$result = mysql_query(”SELECT url FROM urls WHERE short_url = ‘$i’”)
or die(mysql_error()); if(mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {
$row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if(strlen($row['0']) < 80) $durl = $row['0'];
else $durl = substr($row['0'], 0, 77) . ‘…’;
if(date(’g’) == ‘1′ || date(’g’) == ‘3′ || date(’g’) == ‘5′ ||
date(’g’) == ‘7′ || date(’g’) == ‘9′ || date(’g’) == ‘11′)
{$rand = ‘1′; $qe_override = true;} else {$rand = ‘2′; $qe_override = false;}
$frame1 = ‘<frame name=”t” src=”http://thripp.com/ad.php?’ . $row['0'] . ‘” scrolling=”no” border=”0″ ‘

…

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Tweet This is a WordPress plugin for Twitter developed by me. In this 1-hour screencast, I talk over the first 440 lines of the main file, tweet-this.php.

Watch the screencast (.html, Flash, 33MB) or download the source file (.fbr, BB FlashBack Express 2 Player, 54MB).

Whenever I write PHP code, I always use single quotes to echo text, escaping apostrophes and necessary single quote marks with backslashes. Since “double quotes” are much more common in English than ’single quotes,’ this requires less escaping, and the PHP parser parses single quotes slightly faster because it does not check the string for variables. For example,<?php $test = 100; echo ‘$test’; ?> will return “$test” whereas <?php $test = 100; echo “$test”; ?> will return “100″. Expanding on this, to include variables in single quote echo s, print s, printf s, die s, etc., they must be concatenated like so: <?php echo ‘Today is ‘ . $date . ‘ and the weather is ‘ . $current_weather . ‘!’; ?>. As you can see, I included spaces around the single quotes around the concatenation because those are the English spaces on the left and right sides. This is not necessarily the best way to write statements, but it’s the way I prefer and it’s best to stick with one style of programming (house style) and use it consistently. The same statement could be written as <?php echo “Today is $date and the weather is $current_weather!”; ?>, but that could get confusing later due to the way the human mind works.

Sometimes, it may be necessary to construct conditions based on idiosyncrasies in the English language, i.e. plural forms like <?php if($dog_count == 1) $word = ‘dog’; else $word = ‘dogs’; ?> or suffixes like <?php if(substr($num, -1) == ‘1′) $suffix = ’st’; elseif(substr($num, -1) == ‘2′) $suffix = ‘nd’; elseif(substr($num, -1) == ‘3′) $suffix = ‘rd’; else $suffix = ‘th’; ?>. These are best handled with reusable functions.

Facebook, because it is used by over 500 million people or approximately 7% of the global population, is a platform for large-scale modification of human behavior, whether we like it or not. While we may think the layout of Facebook is the logical conclusion of stream-lining and optimal programming, it is entirely possible the layout was developed as such because of limitations of Apache, Linux, PHP, MySQL, HTML, or even laziness. Oftentimes, the ideal solution to a problem is unideal because of the great difficulty required to implement it. Knowing the difference is the difference between having a successful social network or a ghost town.

Therefore, it may be advantageous to manipulate view counts, statistics, and even to run robots and automatons on a new social network, but only as long as 1.) no one finds out, or 2.) the people who find out choose by free will to not reveal the truth, either for a higher power or because they think deception is “cool,” i.e. Jack Bauer in the TV show Twenty-Four.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, a new social network’s main feature could be robots, and people would sign up in droves if they believed the robots would be more interesting to talk to than real friends. The truth of this thought will determine the future of social networking, i.e. will it continue to grow in power but plateau in numbers or will it grow in numbers while no one takes it seriously or is willing to commit secrets to it?

I’ve decided I’m going to consolidate my other websites, thripp.com/blog, composersjourney.com, and iseeafish.com under the richardxthripp.thripp.com domain. Nobody goes to them anyway… they don’t have the PageRank to rank high in Google’s search results… this site does, so why should I try to fight Google?

It’s really better to have all your sites under one domain anyway. I’m not going to merge daytonastate.org, since its value lies largely in the domain itself (similar to daytonastate.edu), but my other websites will be consolidated here including previous content over the next few months… I might even sell off the domains! But probably not.

On a sad note, today my half-sister Anna would be 11 years old. I only met her once, and she passed away in an accident at six months. She died on Father’s Day… 1999-12-16 / 2000-06-17 never forget.

I’ve been having a lot of fun tutoring and meeting people at Daytona State College even though my classes ended Oct. 22, 2010 since I took Fall A classes. Next semester I want to be a tutor at the Academic Support Center or Student Disability Services for math and English… should be fun and help me to relate to people.

I met Trina Chakravarty at Rotary Int’l. last week. She was Miss India USA 2005 and Miss India Worldwide 2006, she’s going to be an M.D. (medical doctor) next year at 24, and she even writes a blog! So amazing…

I have been slacking posting newly re-edited photos here, but I’ll have some this weekend.

Finally, I have decided to disable Infolinks on my sites. Infolinks is an ad network that double-underlines words on your site with ads. They are just too annoying, and they make next to …

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I’ve set up some virtual Thripp.com subdomains for pages on richardxthripp.thripp.com that used to subdirectories. All the old URLs 301 to these new URLs. Check out the first batch of subdomains:

about.thripp.com
contact.thripp.com
domains.thripp.com
index.thripp.com
gallery.thripp.com
portfolio.thripp.com
portraits.thripp.com

All of these are for me only and are completely part of richardxthripp.thripp.com. In 2008, I intended Thripp.com to be a social network built on WordPress MU with subdomains for each user, but that never worked out so I feel comfortable owning the *.thripp.com namespace for my own projects now. I will never be changing the URL of this blog from richardxthripp.thripp.com since it’s been that way for so long, though.

This was actually very hard to implement. I’m using WordPress MU 2.7 and the WP Subdomains plugin, but I had to do hacking on both and I can’t get any subdirectories on these virtual subdomains to work so I have to use query strings. For example, gallery.thripp.com is paginated so page 2 is gallery.thripp.com/?page=2/ because I couldn’t get gallery.thripp.com/2/ to work. However, I’m glad I set this up since I will be using Thripp.com subdomains for many pages and ad campaigns in the months to come.

I was just banned from sending Facebook friend requests. After doing some research, I found I was breaking the rules. FACEBOOK USERS ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO SEND FRIEND REQUESTS TO PEOPLE THEY KNOW IN REAL LIFE. I’ve been sending requests to people who share many mutual friends with me. All of these people were in my “recommended friends” list, but apparently sending out 50 friend requests is abusive behavior on Facebook, even though I only sent requests to people who live within 30 miles of me.

Evidently many people I tried to add to my friends reported me for spamming, because that seems to be the reason Facebook bans abusers. I’m sure this ban was completely automated, and I doubt I’m in any danger of losing my account.

Here is the message I received upon logging in tonight:

To prevent you from contacting people against their wishes, your friend requests and your ability to send messages to strangers have been temporarily blocked.

If more of your friend requests are later marked as spam or reported for being sent to strangers, this block could be extended. To prevent this, you may wish to cancel your pending friend requests. Also cancel unanswered requests?

I opted not to cancel my unanswered friend requests and I have been banned from sending new friend requests for 48 hours. Perhaps I will be banned permanently? I sure hope no one else reports me for spamming.

While I’m disappointed, I totally understand that Facebook can impose whatever restrictions it wants on me because I don’t own Facebook.com like I own Thripp.com. Perhaps my Digital Sharecropping article from 2008 was not so far off.

I’ve decided to get out of domain speculation and never register a domain name again. EVERYTHING MUST GO, $10 EACH, EMAIL richardxthripp@thripp.com AND I’LL SEND MY PAYPAL INFO.

In total, I have 96 domains for sale. Most are registered by GoDaddy and expire in Oct. 2011, but 20 are Netfirms domains and about 5 expire in a couple months. If you want to know for sure, look it up.

These prices are FINAL, please disregard any higher prices I’ve posted elsewhere on the Internet. There could be a lot of gems in here. Don’t pass up this opportunity!

alachua.biz
angley.info
angley.us
anthonyrobbins.us
applicationbusiness.com
axxx.us
bakercounty.us
bradford-co-fla.com
bryanferry.us
chipola.us
claycounty.us
daytonafl.org
daytonastate.us
dispute.mx
dixiecounty.us
dvdsort.com
entrepreneurs-journey.org
exabyte.us
feelgooder.org
flaglercollege.info
flaglercollege.us
flashdrivebackup.com
forthepeople.info
fullsail.biz
g2x.org
g2x.us
gadsdengov.com
gladescounty.us
gulfcounty.net
gulfcounty.us
hardeecounty.info
hardeecounty.us
indianrivercounty.net
jackcanfield.org
jamesblunt.us
jerrybrowngov.com
jimrohn.us
johnchow.info
keiseruniversity.us
levycounty.info
levycounty.us
libertycounty.us
lifedig.com
madlibs.info
markvictorhansen.us
miami-dade.us
monroecounty.us
mydakota.info
mydakota.us
mydaytona.org
myflagler.org
myholmes.net
mymanatee.net
mymexico.us
mymiami.info
mymiami.us
mynewyork.us
mynewyorkcity.net
myorange.us
mystetson.com
mytexas.net
myvolusia.info
mywashington.us
news-journal.org
newsjournal.us
ocgov.us
okaloosa.us
okeechobeecountyfl.com
orangecountyfl.info
orangecountyfl.us
parkingrestrictions.com
pavlina.org
photography-school.org
polk-county.info
polk-county.us
queuebook.com
reunioncounty.com
rickscott2014.com
rickscottgov.com
stephencovey.us
stevepavlina.us
suwcounty.com
swfc.us
tobu.org
tri0.com
verbix.org
volusiacounty.biz
volusiafl.com
waynebray.com
waynedyer.info
yournewyork.us
yourny.net
yournyc.info
yournyc.org
yournyc.us
ziglar.info

Let the liquidation begin!

I’ve switched all ads on most of my websites to AdBrite, which is similar to Google AdSense but does not ban people so easily. I received a $5.73 check for my AdBrite earnings from July 2010, but switched back to AdSense to make more money. Now that I’m banned from AdSense, there’s really no reason not to use AdBrite. I hope this program becomes as good as Google AdSense, but I am expecting a huge decline in income.

This is definitely a wake-up call for me. It’s never good to invest yourself too heavily in one company. It’s like I’ve lost my job. I was making over $400 a month from Google’s program as an independent contractor. Now, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have basically said “YOU’RE FIRED,” and they don’t even want to pay my back wages!

UPDATED 2010-11-22 05:45 GMT: I have been restored to the Google AdSense program, but I can no longer display ads on other peoples websites. This will reduce my income by 75%, but AdSense still generates more revenue than any other program, so I’ve stopped using AdBrite, which only generated about $1.00 per day.