I would venture a good 50% of affilate programs are legitimate, in that you can make money given you have enough skills and time. However, very few affiliate programs offer good profit margins.

The effort required for some affiliate programs, and the resulting monetary gain is simply not enough to justify the time. Is this due to merchant greed? Perhaps. However, it may be ignorance as well since the affiliate manager, or company, may not know what a good payout is to attract affilates.

So....where are the really good affiliate programs? These are the ones where folks make a killing. Are they hiding? No, but it does take hunting, and some fortune to find them.

Why don't affiliate managers promote them more?

I think, for most cases, they genuinely try to make their successful programs known. However, they are competing with hundreds of other affiliate managers trying to get big affiliates too (or any affiliate, for that matter!). In other words, their words are lost in an ocean of promotion of thousands of affiliate programs. So, even if successful affiliate programs are promoted by their affiliate managers, it's still like trying to find the needle in the haystack.

REAL DATA
Google has been keeping historical records for quite a while now -- records of how fast content appears, changes and vanishes over different types of web properties. They also keep historical records of backlinks -- their rate of appearance, change, and disappearance in various types of scenarios.

Google has been studying all this quite directly, en masse and "in the wild" rather than just generating ivory-tower abstractions. By now Google has an immense data set.

FOOTPRINTS and PROFILING
Google has established statistically significant footprints for what is natural and un-natural in the areas of appearance, change and disappearance for content, links, and who knows what else. And they can generate such footprints for various "types" of sites and market areas.

With that pile of data, Google can generate very sophisticated web-maps and visual representations of their data -- and confine those maps to various slices of the whole. They can build extremely accurate link profiles and then see visually what the mean distribution really looks like -- with regards to rate of link acquisition, the ratio of deep linking to domain root linking, the differences comparing branded corporate sites to free hosted pages -- on and on.

THE BIG VIEW and CLOSE-UP
Google can zoom out for an overview of the entire web, or zoom in to look at just e-commerce sites, or just sites without affiliate links. They can profile one single domain and overlay its footprint with the mean profile or footprint they've collected for similar sites or the web as a whole.

They can designate certain hot spots such as "manipulative linking nodes" and display them in red on a link map. Once the available data set grows to a certain level, amazing and apparently magical learnings become simple.

TECHNICALLY PRECISE MEANINGS
In a situation like this, words like "natural" or "manipulative" can take on very precise and rigorous technical meaning. And deviation from the normal footprint can be measured algorithmically and have automated consequences.

Statistically significant deviation can also raise a flag for a human to visually inspect the webmap and associated footprints. When major deviations are spotted, they will not commonly be "false positives" -- although with statistics, anything is still possible in a single isolated case.

GROWING SOPHISTICATION
A lot of the oddities that we see recently in search results are improvments to the sophistication of this kind of data modeling. Big Daddy gave Google a lot more elbow room to crunch many more numbers, keep more records, and so on.

Google has evolved a long way from the crude text matching that characterised early attempts at web search. When we work to understand what is happening with the SERPs today, we should appreciate the near-magic that has been created at Google and not be too primitive in our assumptions about what is, or soon will be, possible on their back end.

And the beauty of such an approach - it scales, and it IMPROVES as scale increases.

CAVEAT
And as I said, what I wrote here contains a lot of educated guesswork, fueled by studying Google patents and by close listening to what Googlers say and how they choose their words. I don't "know" that this is all true, but I'd be very surprised if it isn't.

All major religions are totally pagan. This includes Christianity. Many pagan gods predate Jesus and were essentially Jesus. Osiris and Horus of Egypt; ---- of Scandinavia; Zoroaster of Persia; Tammuz of Babylon; Quetzalcoatl of Mexico; Mithra of the pre-Cristian Roman empire.

Jesus was the light of the world. Horus was the light of the world. Jesus was the way of truth and light. Horus said he was the truth, the life. Jesus was born In Bethlehem, the 'house of bread'. Horus was born in Annu, the 'place of bread'. Jesus was the good shepherd. Horus was the Good shepherd. Jesus is idnetified with a cross. Horus is identified with the cross. Jesus was baptised at 30. Horus was baptised at 30. Jesus had 12 apostles. Horus had 12 followers.

There is absolutely no record outside the New Testament referencing a historical Jesus by any known historian of the time. This covers Jesus's so-called existence. There is no archaeological evidence, no written evidence, nothing.

Some christians argue and say the pagan gods existing before Christ were made by the devil to fool his folowers. This includes being born to a virgn mother on December 25th; turning water into wine; sacrificially dying for the sins of the whole world, and so on, and so on, to infinity. They were created by the devil to mislead his followers. The information is there if you look for it.

It is remarkable how so many ancient pagan gods pre-dating christ were identical to Christ in every possible way. We know those pagan gods did not exist. There is no argument there.

Christianity is one of the biggest religions in the world. In this religion, Jesus existed as a historical real-life person, who represents the truth. So why does the New testament describe Jesus as a seeming rehash of ancient pagan gods? Some say it is because he wasn't a real life person who existed. He was a symbol of the "sun".

Jesus was a solar deity, like the other pagan gods. Christmas, the cross, turning water into wine, the saviour and his 12 apostles, Easter, the phrase "the light of the world", halo around his head, Christian religious day is...SUNday, His coming back in the clouds and every eye in the world seeing him, all represents and symbolizes the sun.

Around 5 years ago, when a lowly A+ certified computer shop tech, people paid me crap loads of money to come to their house and setup their already pre-configured computer. Usually, this involved crawling under the desk and plugging color-coordinated cables into the right spots. Then, adjust the cables so they look clean. Finally, boot-up the computer and leave.

Had these customers taken about 90 seconds to look at the instructions and plugged the cables into the right hole (including the parallel and usb printer cables), they would have saved themselves quite a sum of money.

But... The average consumer has a very big aversion to plugging in cables. It doesn't matter if there is no possible way to get the configuration wrong (well... I don't know how many times there have been calls about people getting the keyboard and mouse mixed-up when using the PS2 connectors)

So, for average users, opening the box and not plugging-in any wires (except maybe power) is a good thing.

There is a growing number of bands and musicians with Myspace profiles. Especially for those in the do-it-yourself punk and hardcore scenes, who are uneasy with News Corporation's Myspace.com purchase.

Primarily, these concerns are over the following clause in the Terms Of Service:

"MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.

Without these terms, MySpace.com is unable to provide the MySpace Services. For example, without right to modify Member Content, MySpace.com is not able to digitally compress music files Members submit. This includes formatting content to satisfy technical requirements. Without rights to publicly perform Member Content, MySpace.com cannot allow Users to listen to music members post.

The license you grant MySpace.com is non-exclusive. This means you are free to license your Content to anyone, including MySpace.com. The license is fully-paid and royalty-free which means MySpace.com is not required to pay you for use on the MySpace Services of the Content you post. The license is sublicensable so MySpace.com uses its affiliates and subcontractors. This includes Internet content delivery networks to provide the MySpace Services. The license is worldwide since the Internet and the MySpace Services have a global reach.

An early and primitive form of messaging systems was developed on private computer networks, like the PLATO system in the early 1970s. Later, UNIX talk messaging systems were used widely by academics and engineers in the 1980s and 1990s. They were used to communicate across the internet.

The first general instant messenger was ICQ. It combined a list, or presence, of contacts with sending messages. In November 1996, ICQ was introduced. It was awarded two patents, from the U.S. patent office.

Now there are many variations of instant messaging. They were developed in many places, each with its own protocol. This resulted in users having many instant messaging applications, simultaneously. This requires several networks to be available. Or, users have a client supporting many protocols, such as Trillian, GAIM or Miranda cients.

There are bulletin board systems (BBS) which are single line. A single caller online and the system operator (sysop) typically chat with each another. As either typed, it appeared real-time for the other person. It was an instant message equivalent.

Many instant messaging services now offer Voice Over IP, web and video conferencing services. Web conferencing services include both video conferencing and instant messaging features.