Cut the effects crew in half. Give half of the left over money to the game writers to make something original. Use the other half of the leftovers to reduce the sale price. In other words, show Hollywood how it should be done.

I can think of a number of things that caused the current financial mess, including but not starting with Reagan's debt. Income tax and mortgage lender subsidies find their way on the list as well. It's no a lack of regulation that caused the mess, unless you mean the other definition of regulation slack -- a lack of being fair to all industries.

I call BS on you. Either you don't understand basic constitutional republicanism or you are from one of those democratic socialist states. In a democracy, the states business goes with the voters. In a republic, the state's business is to stick to the constitution/charter/etc.

Limiting advertising is a blatant violation of the US Constitution. Duh. You can't do it.

This is a blatant lie that needs to stop now. Sales taxes are much cheaper to collect than income and property taxes -- there are significantly fewer retail sales points than tax filers currently. Income tax has the same dampening effect on retail business as sales tax if not worse due to the lack of transparency. Sales taxes are not skewed against the poor. There is nothing forcing a poor person to pay a higher percentage of his income on retail goods than a rich person would pay. If sales taxes were fair, as in they applied to new houses and retail services like visiting a doctor, you would see that rich people pay an equal or higher percentage of total sales tax collected.

I have two comments, and they both go with a the same line of code:

Application.DoEvents(); // the special sauce
//Application.DoEvents(); // somebody's special sauce that needs to be done some other way

The fact that the oil will run out is precisely the reason that we don't need to artificially inflate its price or spend any significant funds on repairing its wake. The money would be better spent assassinating anti-nuclear-power dimwits so that we can move on to the electric car. Of course we currently spend huge amounts of money "enforcing" the low oil price in the Middle East, which isn't right either.

Here's how social engineering works:

1. The IMF/World Bank says "Yo such and such dictator in Africa or South America. Your people suffer too much. You should put them on welfare and burn down / rebuild your rain forests with a loan from us."
2. Mr. Dictator says "Buy me a personal jet and tank to go with it and you've got a deal."
3. The IMF proceeds to create the money for the loan from nothing (aka, it inflates the money of all contributing nations.)
4. The IMF makes real money through interest payments from the poorest countries in the world.
5. Eventually the poor countries default on the loan, at which point the IMF extends them with more printed money.
6. Repeat and Profit.

I just struggle to call making interest on fractional-reserve banking some form of engineering. I think it's robbery.

I complained to Dell recently about the optical drive on my new laptop. If you put in a DVD with the slightest scratch on it the whole system would hard lock. (Yes, Vista allows the drivers the privilege of taking down the whole OS.) Anyway, the support dude was like "well, duh, we can't read a scratched disk." More googling revealed that TCorp had released firmware to fix the problem.

I recently filed a bug about a certain popular grid control's mouse wheel behavior. The company making the control responded that it was not a bug because "Microsoft's [ancient] grid control has the same behavior." Gee thanks, dorks. Good thing you set your standards so high.

For years I've wanted to get some scary Halloween music, but I have no idea what album to get and I've never seen one advertised that appears to have what I want. Any suggestions?

That's not true. To clarify, I think it would be valuable for a individual to register a sole-proprietorship-type business and then put his patent in his business name. I intended for individuals to acquire patents using this mechanism.

I don't think I like that phrase "social value" in this context. Does it mean we only allow patents on devices that improve your odds of getting a date? Or does it mean we only allow patents on devices that demotivate the truly motivated people in this country? (In which case I hope somebody got a patent on minimum wage and graduated tax levels.)