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1. Best overall: Schlock Mercenary
2. Funniest: Girl Genius
3. Best art: Gunnerkrigg Court
4. Most revelant: xkcd

Schlock has become a lot more kid-friendly since Tayler quit his job at Novell and now works surrounded by his children, but it's still entertaining. And he has kept its schedule for a pretty long time. Several other webcomics of that age gradually turned to weekday only, to Monday-Wednesday-Friday, to once weekly, but Schlock Mercenary keeps on updating every day.

Girl Genius has pretty good art, but what I like best is its large ensemble of delightfully inhuman characters. Every time I find a new favorite character, the Foglios introduce another crazy awesome character.

Gunnerkrigg Court doesn't have the very best art, but it's gradually getting better, and the story is intriguing.

xkcd is a comic by a nerd about nerds being nerdy.

In no particular order:

The Oatmeal http://theoatmeal.com/comics
Schlock Mercenary http://www.schlockmercenary.com/
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal http://www.smbc-comics.com/
Girl Genius http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php

This sounds like the Hulu business model. Sell the product to a user, AND sell the user as a product to advertisers. Get paid twice for the same work. It would make Captain Tagon proud.

The article uncannily reminds me of this Schlock Mercenary comic, about the somewhat fuzzy line between journalists and spies. If the state considers Julian Assange an enemy, and Julian works to the benefit of the general public, does this make the state an enemy of the public ?

the penalties for bad driving will go up—drive drunk once, and you lose your license permanently, because why not—you can just use a self-driving car.

One example of when you take those penalties to their inevitable conclusion.

While I agree in the near term, in the long term I'm reminded of This.
  - While it may seem harsh that the 31st-century equivalent of "Driving Under the Influence" carries with it the death penalty, this is due to an inherent inequivalency between MOUI and DUI.

With DUI, you need only climb into your vehicle while under the influence of alchohol or drugs and attempt to drive it home.

With MOUI you must disable a number of safety systems designed to prevent idiots like you from manually operating their vehicles while inebriated, overtired, wasted, decaffeinated, angry, emotionally distraught, or suffering from hormonal disorders like PMS or testosterone poisoning (the latter having been positively identified as a leading cause of stupidity among males between the ages of puberty and death). After disabling the safety systems (which task almost certainly requires ice-cold sobriety), you must decide to switch the vehicle to a manual mode of operation. In some cases, this requires installing a manual mode of operation.

Other examples would include 'johnny taxi' in some movies. You don't NEED to have manual operation modes once you reach a certain sophistication, worst case you have a sort of protected mode 'guided direction' where you provide steering information - but the car still worries about avoiding accidents, and will override you to do so.

Manual driven vehicles would be restriction to 'special hazard' zones and conditions where they just haven't programmed a vehicle to be able to avoid all the hazards yet. Perhaps a dock loading zone where you have to worry about something being dropped on you from overhead.

Burning karma to plug my favorite sci-fi author, Howard Tayler. His major opus is Schlock Mercenary, a web comic about ambulatory excrement working for a company of space marines for hire. Really, it's better than it sounds! And it's delivered the funny every day without fail since 12 June, 2007.

I'm comfortable submitting him as "underappreciated" due to the obscure medium he's chosen - not a lot of recognition to be gained as a comic artist. Howard's comic demonstrates, though, that thought-provoking hard sci-fi can be delivered in a format other than the novel.

Interesting take on options for body armor in the future (this and the next ~10 strips), and how some things don't change.

Seriously, what regular non-porn websites are you finding that serve porn ads?

Schlock Mercenary, a non-porn site where an advertiser went rogue and started with obviously bad ads (complete with porn, flashing, and making noise.)

It just takes one rogue advertiser, and your site now distributes porn.

When was the last time you saw a popup/under ad?

Before or after installing adblock?

In any case, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ produced a popup window..

I don't understand how people possibly come by this type of malware.

It just takes one browser-side exploit. Usually they appear in Java, Flash, or other plugins.

And that's not counting dialog box loops that had a habit of locking up Firefox until you did what the site wanted. It just takes one email from a friend, where you click on a link to watch a video.

Or sometimes, more insightful ones (read through to the end of the story).

...is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less...

In some stories AI's are both enemies and friends.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-28

The issue is once an AI truly has that Intelligence part down then you get into it's motivations, and that is the part that scares people.

Can you trust the motivations of someone who is not only smarter than you, but doesn't value the same things you do in the same ways?

Whether it be a person or a machine the question comes up, and it's not a question that can truly be answered except in specific circumstances.

Just because they don't know how to use the technology correctly does not mean that you should not be concerned.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-08-03

Don't worry, I don't consider Hollywood to be worth a sliver of my time. Including those few Sci-Fi flicks they make: the comparison of Avatar and Pocahontas can tell you much.

Seriously, even cesspools like 4chan are so much above that kind of prolefeed: at least there is some sort of creativity from all participants, unlike Hollywood's politically correct drivel: "content" to "consume".

And you don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to tell a good story: compare recent Sci-Fi movies with Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary.

A perfect example from Schlock Mercenary, back when the art was bad, but the writing was amazing. Today the writing is still amazing, and so is the art.

Odd choice of captcha - buttocks.

For anyone not in on the joke, it's from way back near the beginning of the webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. (The art's a lot better now, and I recommend it to anyone interested in good, silly sci-fi.)

Ob. Schlock
Bonus= includes clone crime.

Schlock Mercenary

One guy running an exit node does not a service provider make.

Traffic through ISPs is expected to originate with the customers. If an ISP itself is also participating in criminal activity, their equipment gets seized, too. That's just not as common as some end user doing something illegal. Then, of course, there's the various political reasons. ISPs maintain logs of who has what address, and can quite quickly turn those logs over to police when asked. Note that I said "asked", not "presented with a search warrant". It's a professional relationship, and it's a great way to stay out of severe trouble.

The fact that an ISP is a corporation adds another important detail as well - multiple people. As a group grows larger, the probability for dissent increases. This is why conspiracies fail and governments are inefficient. At a corporation, there is a reasonable expectation that the business and the majority of its employees will follow applicable laws. If someone is found not following laws, it's likely that the first ones to know about it will be their coworkers, who will take steps to ensure their job security, including talking to police. With a one-man operation, there is no such expectation. The police can reasonably expect the guy to say whatever he can to avoid being convicted, whether or not he actually did anything illegal.

Running an exit node is like volunteering yourself for anything. You might end up helping someone commit a crime. If you want to protect yourself, keep logs of what the exit node's doing, establish a good relationship with police, and hand over those logs at a moment's notice. You're still likely to have equipment seized/searched, but it's much easier to claim you were unknowingly used if you can point at someone else. If this is too much against the principles that caused you to run an exit node in the first place, then expect to suffer for your cause.

Massey:Our case made it through the courts in record time, Captain. It's a mixed bag, though. I've got good news and bad news.

Tagon:Bad news first. That gives me time to prime my weapons if necessary.

Massey:Right.

Narrator:Massey is a victim of a vailed attempt at mind control. As a result, he can see the mind of his would-be masters, but they cannot do anything about it.

Massey:The bad news is that although we won, the partnership collective refuses to honor the judgement. We'll probably never see a dime.

Massey:The good news is that the judge was feeling pretty vengeful when she assessed punitive damages. Agents of the court may destroy up to two billion kilocreds in the collective's assets, and that comes out to about one million attorney drones.

Tagon:Tell me how somebody else's revenge is good news for me?

Massey:We've been named as agents of the court. We get a bounty on every attorney we kill.

Tagon:Oh yes. Oh my, oh my, oh yes...

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2010-05-02

I think yesterday's installment of Schlock Mercenary is apropos regarding the military use of jetpacks.

OK, so the gogol controls my car and it passes a high paying advertiser, does it take a swing through the lot so I can see the digital ads on the front of the building, or does it just park there until I buy something more than $100 value. This does not bother me at all because the car does not have a windows logo or an apple on it.

Be careful what you wish for...

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-01-02

Geeks who don't understand history will be ruled by those that do. -- paraphrasing Kevyn Andreyasn of http://www.schlockmercenary.com/

Intragalactic Bowel Movements actually.

Here's a late vote for a web-only entry: Kevyn Andreyasn of Schlock Mercenary.

Inventor of the Teraport transportation system, he started a galaxy spanning war, successfully used a wormhole for time travel, and embeds antimatter into his Officer rank epaulets so that he can use them as antitank rounds/13.75 kiloton bombs as necessary.

Perhaps he's not as prolific as Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, but he thinks big =)

Is probably the child of this creature.

Obligatory http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2001-03-30

when it's covered in blood?

See the week or so starting here a few days after the strip begins in June of 2000.

Rule 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.

Fun! A target rich environment.

Ommmmminous Hummmmmmm

A patent troll is a patent troll. It doesn't matter who they are or who they are suing. The carriers are doing something with this technology and simply inventing it does not entitle CSIRO to an automatic right to be paid money, or worse to deny its use for the benefit of everyone.

Simply having an idea is not enough justification for being given an absolute worldwide monopoly on it. Ideas have no intrinsic value. If you want to protect your ideas then you must do something with them. Only then will they be protected. CSIRO did not do anything with their ideas. The US carriers did. In my mind, that makes the carriers the more legitimate "owners" of these ideas--as distasteful I find supporting large corporations.

That will trigger a buffer overflow and segmentation fault in the recognition software, consequently snow-crashing the surveillance network wherever I go.

(Or maybe settle for sending a temporary sleep command.)

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less

What about one that doesn't destroy the original you?

There's a long plotline in Schlock Mercenary about this exact thing. Interstellar gates (basically stargates) used for commerce, but the species running them could use them to create clones of anything that went through (enabling them to interrogate any public official who travelled through a gate, etc.)

Rule 29 applies here:

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more, no less.

You don't want to bask in the comforting radio glow of the cosmic background?

You mean like this?

Saw this debate start earlier this week on Schlock Mercenary's site http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/04/dear-mister-bezos-are-you-still-all-mad-and-stuff/. Seems like the author found the discussion heading away from the self-righteous line he wanted and killed it.

Don't think he realized how many of his readers are consumers who want the best price for something.

obXKCD... err... obSchlockMercenary

Hey, it could happen.

I'm not concerned with the difficulty involved, either from an administrative POV, or a technical POV. In effect, Amazon is doing business in my county, so it's up to them to comply with the tax laws in my county. And, they are also effectively doing business in New York City, Seattle, Miami, Anchorage, Bangor, and Los Angeles. They OWE it to each of those jurisdictions to collect, then submit, the proper sales taxes.

That's a great way to put huge numbers of small businesses out of business. You know all the home businesses selling stuff on the internet. For example, http://store.schlockmercenary.com/ , http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/ , etc (I have no idea if those are both US based, but just pretend).

And an incentive for big players to move overseas completely.

Both just what the US economy needs.

Also, if you're a writer, he does a podcast on writing with Howard Taylor of Schlock Mercenary and another author, Dan Wells. Even if you're not a writer yourself, you might find peering into a writer's mind to be interesting.

"If violence isn't your last resort, then you didn't use enough violence." -- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates

"If violence isn't your last resort, then you didn't use enough violence." -- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates

Rule 37: There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'time to reload'.

I believe in change. I'm hoarding every penny because I'm gonna need it. I'm a rich fat bastard and will be taxed accordingly so with change Icanhazcheezeburgers http://icanhascheezburger.com/ at http://www.mcdonalds.com/ then will come the evil that I will do in the name of Cthulhu http://www.macguff.fr/goomi/unspeakable/vault298.html to feed his insatiable appetite and my lust for power. But I will secretly worship http://www.venganza.org/ his noodly appendage and court disaster if the slimey idiot finds out. I will bow to the holiest president ever or suffer damnation by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0drwfnGlF_E having to watch that. I shall covet weapons of massive destruction at http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ and I will dwell in the house of oblivion forever! http://www.elderscrolls.com/home/home.php

I will eat your process servers, rape your thugs and gnaw out their hearts and feast! FEAST! I say!

From [edit] The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates:

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20001001.html