They already have that rule, all the shell companies are headquartered in east Texas.

You happen to be wrong because you are forgetting the multiplier effect. Every dollar the government spends is spent repeatedly before it ends up stopped in a savings account or cash horde somewhere. This is why income/wealth is taxed in the first place, to force it back into circulation.
Taking money and then just spending it immediately IS wealth generating, it is the driver of inflation and all that stuff.

Savings and interest payments have the opposite effect, money that is hoarded is a drag on the economy and does not create wealth.

Configurable parameters are way cheaper to fix *in the field* than a hardcoded value, even if they are undocumented and require reading the code to find. Set them to the sane default and ignore them until you need to repackaging, testing and deploying an application is EXPENSIVE.
Changing a configuration item in a backup environment and running a few sanity checks is relatively cheap in comparison.

If you aren't using a platform that makes configuration of everything that is not a nailed-to-the-floor constant simple then you should probably look into spending a few hours building yourself a small framework for doing so and reusing it on every project going forwards.
Even if it's just a simple key/value store added to your model and read out of your database at start-up and accessible anywhere in your application.

No, pal has a full-frame at 25Hz. But it scans the full size of the screen at 50Hz on alternating scanlines, this has the effect of reducing the flicker to next to nothing due to the persistence of the phosphors

I'm sure they didn't think about detecting people/barricades that are blocking a street, that NEVER would have crossed my mind when designing a vehicle AI. </sarcasm>

People need to look up the youtube videos displaying the realtime computer vision processing that the google cars use, it will begin to change your mind about these things.

You obviously didn't think of the fact that the car's computer would record *at least* a few minutes of telemetry before a crash event that could be reviewed in court or by police in teh event of a crash.

In fact in at least a few places they are considering implementing laws to have new cars sold with "black box" recorders in the near future.

Australia reduced it's maximum work week to 38, all the employers just reigned their employees to contracts that expected unpaid "reasonable overtime" every week. Reasonable being 2 hours or more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SaturnF1EngineDiagram.png
Keeping in mind that this diagram is of something the size of a semi trailer, see that thing labelled "turbine"?

Also you should probably read this; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbojet it will tell you the names of all the major bits of a "jet engine".

There are lot of people that use POP3 mail (such as small businesses) and want to sync calendars and contacts with outlook.

The rush hour times would NOT be hardcoded.

Just modify the setting that tells it which hour is rush hour twice a year, way easier than modifying firmware.
Then make sure trhe next time you create traffic light software make sure this stuff is configurable.

Pretty sure the last one was a bug that was something to do with the cert expiring on a leap-day though.

This is a much deeper problem that shows that there is not a whole lot of good process going on behind the scenes.

Deflation encourages hoarding and reduces the velocity of money - why invest money with risk when i can just hold onto it and increase it's value.

In a deflationary money system, the more people that horde the greater the value of the currency. It's like a catch-22, the more you save the more that people want to save.
Instantly all of people's discretionary spending grinds to a halt and businesses can't get loans because they have to spend a currency that will return in smaller amounts (because everyone else's money will be worth more) and have to pay it back in larger amounts that they may never get. Additionally, if you buy X amount of stock and tomorrow the currency is worth X * 0.9 you have lost money before you started. If it takes you 6 months to get the stock from wholesaler to customer you may never be able to sell it for more than what you paid for it. May as well just keep the money in the bank at 0% interest.

Large amounts of inflation are bad because people can't spend money fast enough for it to be useful, but deflation is worse because it literally stops the economy dead in it's tracks. This is why central banks keep inflation at around 3%, it's not enough to affect day to day prices so business and consumers can plan their budgets but it is enough that people don't keep money under their mattresses. Even putting your cash in an interest bearing account is in everyone's interest because that interest is you being paid to lend your money to businesses or other people to keep the flow of capital going.

People who say deflation is bad should go find a local community college and take Economics 101, it will teach you the basics theories of how this stuff works.

This is why most countries that have loser pays legal costs don't just automatically award them but it is automatically considered, otherwise a large entity could hire entire law firms and then lose on purpose to bankrupt their opponents.

For example in Australia when AFACT (local puppet for the MPAA) took our 3rd largest ISP to court for encouraging piracy by refusing to forward MPAA nastygrams to customers iinet were only awarded something like 75% of legal costs.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure comes down to how legitimate your case was and how able to wear the costs you are.

What the fuck are you on about? Did a bicycle tube kill your mother or something?

You forget how deep the gravity well of mars is, It's not like the moon where you can pretty much just jump to put yourself into orbit around it.
Mars is more like taking off from earth, and the weight of all that fuel would never make it out of *our* gravity well let alone landing it safely and taking off again at the other end.
Until we have the ability to synthesize or mine more fuel at the other end of the trip and land a reusable launch module the trip to mars is one-way.

This is either a plan for one-way mission or it's a scam (or both?)