Since I didn't see a ton of comments posted by people who have experience with this, I thought I'd add one.

Delayed payment is normal. Large companies have very complex rules about how to make payments and how to process invoices. You must be extremely persistent and gracious in order to get things resolved. Each company will respond differently, but I encourage you to make use of some (if not all) of these following tactics:

1) Get a "Master Vendor Agreement" in place with the customer that states invoicing terms. This contract may take months to negotiate and require guidance from a lawyer. Once this is done, all of your projects should be addendums to this original master vendor agreement. This reduces the amount of paperwork the large multinational company has to do to validate each of your invoices and speeds them up.
2) Provide both a discount for early payment and a penalty for late payment. Annotate these discounts & payments on each invoice. If you carefully track your effort, you can know how much it costs you to track long term overdue payments. You can use this to determine how much of a discount you can offer for prompt payment.
3) Designate someone within your company as the "Accounts Receivable" person. It is their job to contact each customer with an overdue payment once per month (or week). They should very carefully take notes on all of their conversations and correspondence, but they _must_ be friendly and relaxed. The goal is to establish a positive rapport with the "accounts payable" person on the other side. It may take dozens of polite phonecalls to get routed to the correct person though, so you absolutely must be willing to put in the effort while not creating bad will.
4) Be gracious when payment is offered. Many times, companies may refuse to pay late payment fees; you can simply say, "I'll remove the late payment fee if you wire the money by tomorrow".
5) If desired, you can contact your bank to find out if they will finance your receivables. Some banks will provide you with cash up front (and charge you a fee) since they know how this process works.
6) Don't harass your point of contact until the invoice is more than a reasonable amount late. Generally, in a big company, the person who signs the contract doesn't even know the person who actually pays the bill. You want to avoid harassing your point of contact (who is usually your biggest fan) until you really need their help getting the bill paid.
7) Know your customers' "approval limits". Generally, executives at a large company will have specific approval levels - for maybe $500 they can simply file an expense report; for $2500 they have to file one form with one signature, and for more than that they have to get approval from a VP level person. If you can keep your projects small enough, you can bypass some of the challenges.
8) Once you've read lots of advice on slashdot and picked a strategy, contact a lawyer before doing anything. Most lawyers will be able to confirm whether your plans follow the law quickly. It'll only cost you a small amount.

And finally, remember, "managing receivables" is part of the cost of doing business with large companies. Factor it into your project costs.

54,328 of which are knock-off movies with titles and cover images suspiciously close to those of Pixar and Dreamworks theatrical releases.

Smart companies can hire effectively by bypassing the resume filters that large companies make mandatory. Smart candidates can get hired effectively by talking directly to hiring managers rather than going through resume filters.

Thank you for the polite response. I did get a bit carried away in my post, so allow me to clarify.

The basic principle I'm approaching here is that you should design your environment for simplicity of maintenance. Keeping your machines separate makes maintenance easier, it makes disaster recovery easier, it makes documentation easier, it makes upgrades easier, and it makes downgrades easier. The gains just keep on going.

When I managed hundreds of separate machines - or even when I manage only three or four machines - it became very advantageous to have each one isolated from the others. If I have to update a shared component to gain a feature, I know only my one application is going to be affected. If there's a security vulnerability in one of them, and I designed their security correctly, only that one machine is exposed.

It's quite true that, in some cases, you sacrifice some performance. In my experience, from doing this repeatedly over the past few decades, this performance hit is generally negligible. On the other hand, there are surprising gains you can get from keeping your applications separate.

Of course, if you're just a home user or doing this as a hobby, none of the benefits I'm describing make much of a difference.

This isn't 1999. You have no reason to host your web server, email server, and database server on the same operating system.

You would be well advised to run your web server on one machine, your email server on another machine, and your database server on a third machine. In fact, this is pretty much mandatory. Many standards, such as PCI compliance, require that you separate all of your units.

Take advantage of the technology that has been created over the past 15 years and use a virtualized server environment. Run CentOS with Apache on one instance - and nothing else. Keep it completely pure, clean, and separate from all other features. Do not EVER be tempted to install any software on any server that is not directly required by its primary function.

Keep the database server similarly clean. Keep the email server similarly clean. Six months from now, when the email server dies, and you have to take the server offline to recover things, or when you decide to test an upgrade, you will suddenly be glad that you can tinker with your email server as much as you want without harming your web server.

Who do you think the Government is? A magical socialist fairy entity?

The government is the people. The government is us. The government is the most effective way to help people that has ever existed.

What you are saying is "We'll rely on the crumbs that fall from a wealthy person's plate to feed the poor."

It doesn't work.

I used to feel that way, until I did some performance tests on our network and realized how much faster the networking stack is in Windows Vista/7/8. They replaced the old file sharing protocol with a completely new one that is optimized for gigabit networks. Once I realized how significant the difference was, I upgraded our entire office as fast as I could.

Frankly, elementary school lessons don't change that much from one year to the next. The current textbooks my child uses are incredibly simple, and they contain pretty timeless lessons. If someone was to take a textbook from 50 or 70 years ago that was out of copyright, they could easily make it available to all schools to use, or they could copy relevant sections from many books to make a single "First Grade Math Book" or "Second Grade English Book".

Doing so would eliminate a HUGE amount of the cost of school. When you see how much a school spends on textbooks, you'll be bowled over. The latest textbooks I've seen have basically one sentence of text per page, accompanied with huge, two page spread art pictures - totally worthless and a waste of space. Even "See Spot Run" had more than one sentence per page.

Stop our schools from spending money on stuff that doesn't matter. The textbooks aren't going to make our kids smart. Time with a teacher will.

I would totally buy this game. Except I can't.

I happen to prefer playing games sitting down on my couch with a console controller. I played every level in New Super Mario Brothers Wii thoroughly, until I got every star. This is just simple fun. I would happily pay a few bucks a month for new levels, even if the new levels aren't radically different.

But they won't sell them to me. Because they follow the release strategy suggested in this article - trying to make each headline game fundamentally different, and placing their flagship game on a new console. This works when you realize that gameplay experiences people love are the best way to get consumers to upgrade to a new console. They're clearly, and cleverly, attaching the New Super Mario Brothers experience to the sale of the WIIU. Which means I'll be frustrated and unable to buy the game unless I upgrade the console.

That's just how this stuff works :)

$75 per year for a safe deposit box large enough to store 3 external USB hard drives. Definitely the best way to go for inexpensive peace of mind.

Although, be careful about your external drives! If you accidentally leave them in the car, even briefly, they're liable to overheat and melt down.

You should read the short story "... And Now The News." It's truly one of the most eye opening short stories that nobody knows about. In many ways, it's a gloriously alternative view about the sadness of life and the optimism that people can have. Truly one of the best stories I'd recommend to anyone.

Here's the link:
http://books.google.com/books/about/And_Now_the_News.html?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC

Some more commentary:
http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/faq.html

I would have said that this was funny, but have you seen the guys at JPL? If anything defines hippies today it's them.

Those guys are beyond awesome. I've never met a crew of people who make space more exciting.

Netflix replaced a model whose business parameters they controlled (DVD by mail) with a model whose business parameters they do not control (licensing streaming content). Eventually, Netflix will be forced to become a Cable TV provider that streams videos on demand; you'll sign up to Netflix and then pay an extra $10 per month for access to Universal movies, $5 for access to Comedy Central, and so on.

I've watched them.

Classroom lectures are somewhere between 30-60% of the educational value of school. The remaining 40-70% is direct communication with the teacher, interaction with your peers, homework, and performance evaluation.

I'm not certainly convinced that Khan academy videos are better than an in-person teacher, but they have a few key advantages: 1) they are free, and 2) they are available at any time.

Beyond that, I certainly hope there's a way to continue to improve videos and instruction. Teaching in general is ripe for open source improvements. Why do we keep paying for textbooks each year? Why not have a single open source textbook that can be read on a tablet PC, eReader, or printed as a PDF?

Frankly, we pay a lot more money for non-teacher parts of education. Even if teaching is abolished, we'll have to have someone take care of our kids and make sure they do their lessons. Whatever we call that person, the job description sure sounds like a teacher to me.

I use a WYSIWYG editor all the time. I have Notepad++ open in one window, and Chrome in the other. I right click on any element that shows up incorrectly, and select "inspect element". I can then edit it until it's right, and preserve my changes in Notepad++ in the other window.

I've never heard of Dreamweaver though. The name sounds like this program I used to use ten years ago that caused endless nightmares.