RISC architecture is going to change everything.

>and ignoring that order would still escalate the matter to criminal levels

There you go. Possession isn't illegal, ignoring the court order not to delete it is. Simply having a picture on your computer where the model failed to sign a release won't ever land you in prison. This is a workable system that avoids the complications of ruining innocent people's lives.

I've been falsely accused of things although never had to fight the justice system for my freedom, and I've known plenty of people whose lives have been turned upside down after they were falsely accused by overzealous child protective service workers. I've known plenty of law enforcement people who I wouldn't trust to do the right thing in any of these cases. This is scary shit.

It's almost as if someone invented a disposable Brita water filter!

Shoot, sorry to reply to myself, but the alternative to MySQL is PostgreSQL, and it's much, much better. Trust me on that. Nobody gets it at first, but anyone who spends any significant amount of time using RDBM's properly will end up wondering why MySQL even exists.

Odds are you'll never have enough time to learn programming at the depth that someone who is very good at it knows it.

Start small. Learn how to write a static web page using nothing but Notepad in Windows. Then, when you've mastered that, try using CSS to change the way it looks.

At this point, you can get into Javascript, which is a fantastic language for learning. Try to make something on the web page change when you mouse over it. Experiment with changing text fields in Javascript.

Then, write a simple "desktop" calculator as a web page.

This will likely take you a few months or weeks if you spend a lot of time at it. Remember, use Notepad only. Don't worry about making it work in anything but Internet Explorer (or your browser of choice) because that will make you insane.

When you can write Tetris, then you're ready to work with databases and servers.

Don't use MySQL, it's an abomination. If you have Microsoft Access, start with that. Make a project in that that real people will use. If maintaining it becomes difficult, it's because you don't know enough database theory. Figure out on your own why you want data to be fully normalized and only flattened with many saved SELECT queries. Try to figure out how to write the queries in SQL using the (excellent) query editor. Write UNION queries.

Now you're ready for a server and web site.

You're assuming they tested it on one person at a time. More realistically, they would fire it on a much larger group to test its crowd control capability.

So really, this paints the picture of a group of 100 people getting hit with the ray, standing up and cheering, "FUCK YEAH! Hit us AGAIN! WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" about 1000 times.

I'm thinking they tested it on drunk frat boys.

The Perl interpreter can.

Lyx is cool, but I like LaTeX by hand because it's just faster. Anything repetitive I write my own definitions (i.e. macros) for, so it's a huge time saver.

I really dislike WYSIWYG. I want to type, never use a mouse, and have the program format it for me.

I did my thesis in LaTeX; in fact I learned LaTeX to do the thesis so I wouldn't have to use MS Word. I probably didn't save any time since I was starting from scratch with LaTeX and had to update the school's age-old LaTeX template to work with the newer versions, but man, when I saw everyone else struggling with Word and whatever awful math plugin they had to use, I was glad I took the extra time.

Now I use LaTeX whenever I can since the output is so beautiful and I can type lists and tables a lot faster than I can mouse them in in Word.

I highly recommend it.

Plato's quote is especially hilarious when considered in light of Athen's continued dominance as a world cultural and military power.

Air Force? Forget traffic accidents, you're much more likely to get struck by lightning on the base golf course.

If the State of California were the U.S. Congress, then you'd definitely have a point.

States have historically had more leeway in such matters; there used to be no problem, even Constitutionally speaking, with an individual state having an official religion.

I'm using the 9.10 netbook remix. On the old laptop I can't remember which version...probably 9.10 also.

They both did weird things, like show networks with odd undecodable Unicode characters in them that I've never seen before. Like you try to connect to a network and all you see are letters with umlauts and Mahjong tiles.