I use a dual monitor workstation + a laptop to play the course content. This allows me my regular programming workspace on my computer with any reference material I need on the second monitor. Using the laptop allows me to go fullscreen without worrying about window focus and makes the material easy to pause by mashing the spacebar. My laptop also is setup to provide no notifications or interruptions so it is a distraction free workspace. I also download course material that I can listen to on drives.

A disclaimer like this also gives a good deal of publicity to the announcement, almost begging an article like this to be posted.

Finally a reason for socially inept people to buy diamonds!

Getting sued for picking the winning loto numbers?

There is no way distribution of the New York times costs the price of a kindle per subscriber.

Umm, my future had me flying through a huge chamber freezing other people's limbs with my gun and scoring points with my helmet.

We really should have gone with my future...

He was a whiny teen. Luke Skywalker just accepts his fate. In an ACTION movie, that is important. Leave the shallow soul searching for MTV. The problem with the movie is that Darth Vader it truly and wholy evil. The "saving" at the end of Return of the Jedi was already bad enough (in the books and expanded universe it is made clear that he can't cross over nearly as easy, hence the reason to burn the corpse where Yoda and Obi-wan just faded away) but it still doesn't sit well with the hero ending of the bad guy being blown away, but is excused because it is different enough to be seen as original.

But he AIN'T a hero character. And in the first three movies you are supposed to care about this guy who really is not going to end up saving the day. It would be like making a movie about Adolf Hitler's youth and expecting people to root for him. Sorry, no. And there was a remote possibility that we could have cared, if we had seen him fighting the dark side only to be tricked fatally in the end in a way nobody could forsee. But the entire 3 movies are like a Punch and Judy show, with the audience screaming "look out behind you" and punch looking the wrong way and saying "where". Hilarious when 4 year olds see it done in a good puppet show, but the political antics were beyond young kids and below adults. Where were those supersmart jedi, were was the mastermind of the emperor. No action hero to save the day, no intense manipulation by unseen puppeteer masters who turn wheels within wheels. Just... well just the 3 prequels which told a story that could have been told in a simple expanded universe book in a way that would not have focussed on the villain but on a new hero whose path crosses that of the villain.

There is a reason this guy takes 70 minutes to tear the movie down, because the prequels are really that fucking bad. Not the kinda bad that you get when a producer gets his hand on something he doesn't understand (Uwe Boll) or the producer just can't direct (Plan 9 from outer space) but the kinda bad that arrives when a lot of very talented people forget just what the fuck they are good at doing.

The simplest example of this is the CGI battle on the grassy plane. What did CGI do well in those days? Tech scenes, hard corners, steel and concrete. So what did they render, lush grass land. It looks fake! They managed to get a green lawn which you can shoot for real on any golfcourse looks horribly fake.

And if you think 20 minutes is 1/3 of the movie, then your brain must have carefully restructured itself to shut out the most damaging memories, memories that if they were to surface would turn you into a bliddering murderous psycho.

Proof, you think the movie could be fixed. Amazing healing capacities the brain has. I can remember it all, but I am sane! Ain't I Mr. Fibble?

Having a block of IP addresses does not make one an ISP.

Yet, this link seems to support my statement.

http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

Call me old fashion, but I am a firm believer of do on thing and to it well. Your list of requests have a very broad scope and it wasn't clear if you expected one software package to do all of it. There are many great open source software packages for use with business.

GnuCash is an excellent accounting system to help you keep your financial accounts organized. I'm not really sure what is entailed with 'issuing a W-2' other than handing your employee a form. I have seen various companies use a combination wiki, dms and cms, all of which have many open source choices, to organize corporate data, and serve it in an clean and clear fashion to interested parties.

As far as tax filing software, it looks like this is not a foreign question to slashdot:

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/011259

One of the products offered in the above link is: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ Open Tax Solver

I am unclear what you mean by legal template. If you mean pre-formated document, OpenOffice.org has a large collection of templates you can browse through. If you mean canned agreements and contracts, they are around on the web, if you search for them. I must add IANAL so be careful using any generalized contract.

How many other tools, apart from PHP, did you properly try?

Fair enough, and I agree with your prior statement, which was that C is not hard to learn. I'm old enough to have worked extensively in C because we didn't have the more modern alternatives. Even C++ was new, dinosaurs were still leaving tracks in the mud, and Kernighan was still dating.

I have not recently encountered many problems where I needed to take on C or C++ to create a sufficiently efficient solution. I have nothing against C, indeed I loved working in it back in the day. I never worked with C++ to become comfortable with the libraries, so I just steer clear of it. Java/Scala have worked well enough for anything that was intensive, and Python is just easier for everything else. It's a rare problem in my world where developer efficiency isn't a primary goal, and that hardware can't be used to solve the rest of the need for speed (assuming a reasonably efficient implementation). I know there are many cases where that isn't true, they're just rare in my work.