I remember as a kid believing in this odd concept of programming hierarchy.
You start with Basic, move to Pascal, then to C finally you end up in Assembly.

However experience has taught me that Programming languages do not fall in a hierarchy, but tools good at solving different problems.

Basic is good at Throw Away code. Solve your problem give your result. Doing it in any other language you are just wasting your time with details.

Pascal is good for that simple program that you want to maintain and share and deploy. Better structured however still covers a lot of the memory management nonsense.

C is good that Professional App that really needs to be good performance, the extra work in managing the memory means you can take shortcuts in the right spot to get extra Speed.

Assembly when you need to interact with the hardware, make new drivers and bypass parts of the OS.

It becomes the right tool for the right job, and less of how impressive you look by the fact you can code in some language.

Sure, mud/salt/dirt can get in the grill too.

The real issue about VB.NET is the .NET added technical complexity to the language.

BASIC then Visual Basic was intended to be a language that anyone can code without a strong Computer Science foundation.

Great for Engineers who need to do some complicated calculations or create some simulations. Or for Business folks who need to get these early computers to do things with it, as we didn't have Spreadsheets ready yet.

Visual Basic was still easy for these groups too. It did a better job of organizing stuff into a better model. But because it was point and click people still liked it and used it.

However VB.NET those Computer Scientists got to it and tried to make it a "Respectable" programming language, with classes and abstraction and a lot of stuff while useful if you know what you are doing, has in essence became too complex for generally smart people who do not code all the time, and just wants to get something quick and dirty out.

The thing I don't get with these camera displays is the fact that they don't seem to have wipers on the camera, with cleaning solution.
Snow/Salt/Mud/Dirt really collect and make visibility bad. If you are offroading then one puddle and your feature is useless.

We all want open and free... Until people start abusing the open, and putting too much stuff that society doesn't want. Then we demand that we close it down for these exceptions.

Right now we are in the middle of a societal struggle between freedom and protection.
We want both, however it cannot work that way. If we want to be free, then we are open to danger. If you want someone to protect us from danger then we loose our freedom.
To make it even more murky there isn't a good rule on what is safe and dangerous. Are bringing up particular vulgar words dangerous? How about how much skin can you show? What about particular view points?
If you want full freedom you are going to need to expect a lot of people with ideas that you disagree with, will be spouting what you consider to be poison to your view of what is true. If you want more protection than we need to follow a set of rules made by a select few.

One of the main issues is lack of understanding of embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells.
We classify Stem Cells in one group... However the issue with embryonic stem cells are that they come from aborted human fetuses. Which many people would consider sacrificing a human life just to perform scientific research, this usually falls in the unethical category. However there is a group who doesn't consider a fetus to be human life, so it would fall in the ethical category.
Politics being politics, will normally favor the group to say No don't do that, vs the group that will say lets go do that.
As you will suffer less angry people from a dept who didn't get funding, then a dept that does get funding.

They care about their patents.

The rock above it looks like TOS Romulan War Bird. The little one below it look like a bird wing.

That is the problem with most labor laws. There are usually tricks to get your way. You don't fire the person you force them to resign. You can perform a witch hunt and wait for any slip up as a reason to fire someone.
We have fire: Where termination is caused by poor/inappropriate performance.
We have layoff: Where termination is from the employer to reduce staffing to save money.
We have "resignations": Where the employer tells the person that they need to resign, otherwise we will make their lives difficult.
We have resignations: Where the employee decides to leave the job, in a graceful method.
We have quitting: Where the employee leaves instantly, and not so gracefully.

Exactly, it is doing things more complicated than a normal reflex.
A lot of primitive animals work on reflex. Either move towards or away from light. When touched grasp. A primitive brain can process things like when dark wait a while to see if is not something like a predator overhead. Avoid objects in the way. Very simple type of reasoning.

The hardware will, and the replacement parts may not work with your old software.
Think having Windows 95 and trying to use it on a new computer with USB Mouse and Keyboard or worse Bluetooth. Good luck with that wireless card, That new video card too may not work too well.

Yes you could in theory make drivers for the old OS to allow it to run on new hardware but to what end until you are spending more time making drivers then you have people using the system.

The biggest thing from XP to Windows 7 and 8. Is the growth of 64bit processors, systems using far more than 4gigs of RAM. Also it is far more common to have duel head displays. Multi-Touch Displays are getting popular, as well track pad/touch screen gestures.

Sure we can keep adding XP drivers, but for how long... As most people get new PC's every 4-6 years.

I think it is an issue of applying a stereotype to the driver without any logical information behind it.
Oh look it is one of those Hippy Tech workers with their Green cars that makes them seem so pretentious and better then us.

I drive a Prius, and I get a lot of cars that seem to be more aggressive towards me (especially ones with Right leaning bumper stickers) then they were when I had the sporty convertible. They don't realize that I have a long drive and my main factor for the Car was price of fuel (I have a long drive), and not necessarily being green or making a statement.

Smart cars get more interest because they look even more out of place. Then a normal car, meaning that they must be that much more pretentious.

The 1990's caused a paradox in what was needed at the time for a GUI and what the system could comfortably support.

Back in the 1990's too many people were unfamiliar with computers and were intimidated by them. So the UI Trend at the time was to give them something familiar in their normal life to work with. A button needed to beveled, to make it look like a real button. A switch needed to look like a physical switch. The idea of putting many documents in one spot was used as a folder... So people felt comfortable with such a system it needed to look like a real life object. Now during the 1990's we were developing useful color graphic displays priced for average users (VGA/SVGA) With 256 colors available, we were able to make such graphic elements appear realistic. But such processing took a lot CPU time and memory for these systems. A GPU wasn't a popular feature for a PC until the end of the 1990's. So many of these elements were crude as to balance what the end user wanted and what the system could support, without killing everything else.

Now Microsoft Bob while a failure was an attempt to bring this idea into a complete level. But it was an attempt to show the trends of the time in UI development.

As people got more use to computers we are able to tone down the gui effects, at the same time give them a little more appeal. The button is less pronounced, and given a softer gradient to it. Scroll Bars got rid of the Up and Down buttons and just left the scroll bar. Text boxes are almost entirely 2d. Thinner lines, less bulk and less realistic, however because people know how click or press, swipe or drag we need less elements to try to egg them on to do the right thing.

That was because Microsoft Screwed up on their development of Vista aka Longhorn. They paid a huge price for this delay. It allowed Apple to come in and beat them up and people switched to Macs. When Vista did get released none wanted it and more people switched to macs. It took until Windows 7 to really get people off the platform.
That said, 3 1/2 year is the point where your PC starts getting old and out of date. Normally it is 4 years, you probably can keep it for about 6 years. But that PC that you got in October 2010 can probably be upgraded to 7.

Science is a process with the end goal of leading us to fact.
One of the parts of the process, is if you are faces with many different models that work, the simplest one is probably the correct one.

However the simplest model isn't obvious all the time, as you are trying to make a pattern out of complex results. Because we are trying to figure out a pattern from a complex result, we will need to try out many different models, and these models can get complicated. But in the process of finding the complicated model, we can often find a reduced form inside of it.

Scientists are human like the rest of us. They make mistakes, they can jump to assumptions. But the Scientific process if left alone by politicians with agenda, can help work out many of the human mistakes over time.