Well, of course, if you only have one e-mail address, that may be the way to go. If you have six, from different providers, the client has clear advantages. If you want portability, an encrypted USB-stick and Thunderbird Portable are your friends.

LibreOffice Base is a good start, but is far from offering the ease of prototyping and reporting of Access. Also the forms are clunky in my experience. I've tried using it and found it very lacking. I had high hopes in it when it was announced, and hoped to replace Access with it, but I had to come back to Access shaking my head. One would say it isn't so difficult! Access offers a "good enough" RAD from Access 97, that is... 15 years ago! Somebody should have stitched together a scripting language, a database explorer, a form and a report development environment. And yes, the forms should use native controls, please. And every time I go to a new client, they end up asking us for some side application that ends up being done in Access because there is nothing half as good in OSS. And they get more and more locked in Windows.

I just helped a medium sized company shed off Office. They practically had no problems, apart from some Excel wizardies. Access apps were put into Access runtimes, to avoid paying Office licenses. But they cannot leave Windows, because these runtimes run only in Windows, and there is no easy way of porting these apps.

In my experience, one thing blocking the adoption of Linux in corporate environments are MS-Access applications. Not only legacy ones, that could be moved, but the fact that there is nowhere to move them to. There is simply nothing that remotely approaches Access in the Linux world, and it's a pity.

1) When selecting your area of operation, select low competition sectors.

2) Select, create, or maneuver into, a position of high bargaining power against clients and suppliers. That is, you can apply price pressure to suppliers and the client has not much leverage with your prices.

  3) And last but not least: Thou shalt not go against macro trends in Economy, Demography or Technology.

I think your friend's business fails in the the three rules of basic strategy, specially sinning against the Third. There is nothing much to be said, except trying to reinvent the shop, preferably as other kind of shop. If keeping it as a video rental is paramount, I'd specialize, perhaps in terror-gore films, or European films, or black and white. But of course only if the shop is in a big metropolitan area, not in a mall.

Anybody knows how efficient is that? As compared with storage in water reservoirs for example?

I find much more coherent the explanation that says that humor is a signal of no-danger. If somebody falls down and hurts himself, you don't laugh. If you laugh, the rest of the members of the tribe know is nothing dangerous.

although they are free to walk out at any time

That kind of makes everything different, doesn't it.

"Don't worry, Mr.Gates, I'll use all my influence to make them replace that software with free alternatives. Would that satisfy you?"

WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material
That's an idea! Sue Wikileaks for copyright infringement. I wonder why they haven't done it yet.

Disadvantages of no-cash:
- All your transactions are tracked. Your money privacy goes down the toilet.

Advantages of no-cash:
- You cannot be robbed, at least not of you cash. Even if someone forces a transaction on you, you can track it.
- All taxes will be paid. Think about it. Really think about it. All the rich people would have to pay all their taxes. That would be a revolution. That would change the world. That's the reason this will NEVER happen.

You can give them socks and underwear. That will surely provoke thoughts of murder in their minds. I know it did in mine.

it impossible to use a mobile phone while in a car can save lives,

Just not the lives of anybody trapped in a car and slowly dying because he cannot call anybody, that is.

I would go one-way. The problem would be, I would be living with people that had chosen lifetime exile from the only place in the Universe fit for human life. That means they're a lot of severely maladjusted people, social misfits, and related fauna. We'd tear ourselves to pieces in about ten weeks.

Most of the things you learn in school and college are mostly useless. Except reading, writing and a bit or arithmetic, nothing is really too useful for the majority of people. Most of the things you need for most of the jobs out there you have to learn at the job, anyway. Most of the concepts we'll meet in daily life are never even touched in school. You don't learn about insurance, or what's a bill, or a receipt, or a mortgage, or car mechanics or home repairs. But we learn about biology (why? what has biology to be so widely taught? agreed we are living things, but still), lots of history (interesting, sure, but useful? only if you are Indiana Jones, I suppose), physics (you'll learn all you need about gravitation by age five, anyway), literature (that's more useful than math?).

The syllabuses we trod in our life seem at best random and at worst residual accumulation of pet topics from a long genealogy of teachers. Most of it comes from forgotten times, where you could really grasp ALL the human knowledge of the time, so no selection was needed. Since that's no longer the case, some selection is overdue, for math and for all the rest of topics. But it seems like once installed in the syllabus, there is no way of getting something thrown out. And it should be a continuous work in progress, year in and year out, selecting what must come in and what must go out.

The best that can be said of today's education is not about what we learn, because we forget that soon, but how that learning teaches us to better ways of thinking. In this regard, Mathematics should be considered fundamental. Perhaps an instinctive suspicion of that is what keeps Math in our schools, who knows?

The problem is just in your expectations. If you start with 1600x1200, then you'll be disappointed. If you start with a 1024x768, you'll notice how your perception of the new monitors improve. If you want more improvement, just start with a worse monitor. Don't mention it.