Don't focus on renting DVD's. A lot of people own a few hundred DVD's that they don't watch. Offer to buy those, and sell used DVD's cheap enough so that it amounts to a rental that you don't have to return. You can make money over and over on the same DVD that way.

Allow people to do this by mailing in DVD's. Make it as easy as Netflix.

Otherwise, make him watch the latest Halloween South Park and pour him two or three shots of a good single malt scotch.

We pretty much know that the economy runs better with a slight amount of inflation. What that means is that the government has to "print" money each year to increase the amount in circulation. Even with zero inflation, if the economy is growing (people do more stuff, make more stuff, etc.) then more money has to be printed to prevent deflation. So we print more money. The important question remains: how does that money get into circulation?

A good way to inject the money is to spend it on infrastructure projects. This does, in fact, create jobs, either directly or indirectly.

A bad way to inject the money is the way the government currently does it, which is through manipulations by the Fed to increase money lent by banks, which is the primary means of commercial money creation in the U.S. This has the drawback of creating a massive amount of debt, shared by you, me, the government, etc. We've seen recently how this can lead to massive irrational lending and bubbles and crashes. Not really a good thing.

Check out this video for a more interesting and comprehensive take on money creation: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544

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.