That's how I see it. If I'm at home, don't monitor me. If I'm accessing a vault full of cash, OK maybe. If I'm flying an armed fighter jet, I won't object too hard if they want to track me every time I go off course and engage my weapons.

Exactly - Pretty much everything is air-cooled. Even the frion in your fridge. It's just that it's easier to circulate some things than others.

The Chinese produce at least some very adequate imitations of foreign inventions, but the quality is inconsistent unless you're looking very closely at it. The French openly admit copying tech from the US (and presumably others). The Chinese may not openly admit to copying foreign designs, but it's readily apparent. I have no reason to believe that US companies don't have similar practices. And that counts double when it comes to military. As for a solution, I wish I had a friendly one, but practically the Chinese seem to be doing it right. Copying is cheap, manufacturing is cheap, inventing is expensive.

A good number of people believing in something makes that thing valuable, not right. CDs reproduce sound more accurately than vinyl, but not necessarily the "same". I'm not an elite violinist and calling myself even an amateur cellist, guitarist, or pianist would be an insult to anyone who could adequately play. BUT, I've done "acoustic" analysis on measurements orders of magnitude beyond human hearing and can quantitatively determine the difference between produced "sounds". When you want a medium to produce exactly what you make it produce, that can almost certainly be matched by modern engineering. When you want to measure the "color" of sound or some other metric that can't be reproduced except by the perception of the recipient, it's entirely a matter of choice.

Which is better - Blue Oyster Cult played near the pain threshold on vinyl on tube amps or Tchaikovsky sampled at 48 kHz played by a master orchestra on $300 noise-cancelling headphones? It's entirely up to the listener and if somebody wants to pay a premium for one over the other, that's exactly what it's worth. Personally, I like both.

Visual Studio Express is Microsoft's zero-cash programming environment. Why do you want a high-cost office suite with a lousy macro engine to be discounted to free when they already offer their actual development suite pro bono. It's upgradeable to more complete Visual Studio versions later. This will encourage Microsoft-centric code, but that can be avoided and it's less specific of a tie-in than VBA. C#, C, C++, and more are included.

If you don't want to be tied to Microsoft-specific tools even on Windows there are other options. Those include other office suites and other actual development tools.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have OOBasic and can be scripted with Python and Java if you really want. These things are zero-cash and open source.

You can use Lazarus and FreePascal (Wikipedia article about FreePascal) or Eclipse and Java/C/C++ if you'd rather. Or you could use Eric and Python. Or Padre and Strawberry Perl, complete with MinGW. Some of the IDEs are more or less general and language agnostic, while others are mainly narrowly targeted.

Don't forget MsysGit (git for Windows) if you're not using Cygwin and haven't already chosen a version control system.

Really, you could be teaching with a good programmer's editor rather than specifically with IDEs too. vim, Emacs, jEdit, Gedit, and others are applicable. Some of them are powerful enough to make that line between editors and IDEs very fuzzy.

What, exactly, would a free copy of Word get you that isn't already available?

By that definition, going to my office every day isn't necessarily a 2-way trip. Nor is getting up to use the bathroom, or going to the store for food, or going to bed. But it doesn't mean that I'm going to stop doing those things. I go planning to return, but accept some varying level of risk based on the potential benefit of making the trip. Going to bed is safer than the bathroom. Going to the bathroom is safer than going to the store. Going to the store is safer than going to Mars. But, depending on the individual and the perceived benefits, all of those adventures may be undertaken.

Hell, you can get a decent non-enthusiast desktop with the new operating system for under $400 now. What people should be bitching about is how much hassle it still is for the average non-geek to get the applications from the old XP machine to the new shiny 7 or 8 machine with settings intact.

Actually OS X is free now if you own the hardware. The hardware is expensive, though.

In the US there's a good chance that medical office software mentioned needs to be upgraded by October to deal with ICD-10 anyway. Anyone who does that large of a code change and still won't support a newer operating system than XP needs to not be writing software that stores medical data.

P is things known to be solvable in polynomial time on a classical computer. NP is things that may be solvable on a classical computer in polynomial time given some discovery we've not yet made. Therefore NP may be (but probably isn't) a subset of P.

See the subject.

NP-Hard is not the same thing as NP-Complete the last time I checked. Neither is NP yet known to be non-P nor P. That's why it's NP (nondeterministic polynomial). P would never be equal to NP. NP may be a subset of P. There are problems that are both NP-hard and NP-complete, but not all NP-hard problems are NP-complete. That means that solving one NP-hard problem is not necessarily equivalent to solving the NP-complete problem set.

Houston, for one, so long as you're one of the first few cars at the light.

There are some excellent treatments for schitzophrenia, but unfortunately none for psychopathy.