1) Legos seem to have a bit of a revival lately, especially with the Lego series of video games. If anything, they're very much mainstream now, which is a good thing. Anything that helps kids use their imaginations to build stuff with is good.

2) Rummicube - Eh, did anyone actually play this? Or was it even part of Geek culture?

3) Star Wars/Star Trek - Star Trek and Star Wars have had something of a revival recently with the reboot and Episodes 1-3 and Clone Wars. Okay, the Star Wars stuff has kinda sucked recently, but Star Trek can still cool to a modern audience without being nostalgic.

4) Soviet Russia - Did anyone actually use this outside of some seriously dated Yakov Smirnoff materials in the 80s and 90s? You hear it nowadays, but it's so rare, I wouldn't put it with the rest.

5) Netcraft - Such a tiny tiny minority of "geek culture" shouldn't qualify this to the whole.

6) Bill Gates - Bill Gates and his foundation have done so much good recently, I'm loath to make fun of him. He's improved education and vaccination in the developing world, saving lots of lives and giving prospect to a lot of children who had none before. That's pretty much the context I see him in now - rarely the "Bill Gates is Evil" meme now. Update your Meme, man.

7) Desktop Linux - Eh, so what? Linux is improving on the desktop all the time, and Linux has come to dominate phones (and to a lesser degree) succeeded on tablets, so it's not really that farfetched.

8) PACMAN - The only time I see this is when Google brings out the doodle.

9) Tron - Maybe it's a little nostalgic, but it just had a big movie come out a few months ago. That's not nostalgia, man, that's new and cool.

If he says that he is Christ, then he's clearly publicly disclosed his "invention" 2000 years ago. The one year statutory bar prevents him from receiving a patent on this. Thus, the powers of Christ is in the public domain.

While I agree with Stallman that eBook and eBook DRM have really destroyed our freedoms with respect to books, I am having a lot of trouble understanding his tax fund proposal.

Doesn't distributing a tax fund to authors by popularity mean that I, as a person, lost the freedom to vote with my pocketbook not to pay certain authors? I have no desire for my tax dollars to go to the author of the Twilight books when I would much rather get my money to a deserving less known author who puts out a much superior work. For that matter, how do you measure popularity anyway? If the funding for authors are from a tax-payer fund, then it kind of means that people have no real direct costs to buy books, right? You can't measure it by downloads because people would download all sorts of stuff if they don't have to directly pay for it and not necessarily read it. The voluntary funding may be a good idea and has shown to work in the past - however, each of those successful voluntary funding schemes were aimed towards a rather small demographic who is passionate enough to donate - I have no idea if this idea is scalable or feasible when it's put to the market at large.

Sorry, not your mother, icknay, but the person who Asked Slashdot.

Don't Forget MIT's OpenCourseWare Intro to Computer Science lectures. It might move at a faster pace than for a high school student, but it should give your mother some idea as to how to structure the lessons and concepts.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/video-lectures/

As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program. It was definitely aimed at the beginner to intermediate level programmers and did a pretty good job at explaining fundamentals of programming to a bunch of high school sophomores and making it understandable. As I recall, you can probably go through several chapters per class because it's not so dense and impenetrable that you need bash your way through.

Here's a link to the 7th edition: http://www.amazon.com/How-Program-7th-Paul-Deitel/dp/0136117260
However, there are plenty of copies of 6th editions floating around for pretty cheap. If I recall correctly, copies of the 5th edition are even available for download for free, which makes the curriculum that much more cost-effective.

Anyway, best of luck, hope that helps.

C'mon, Google Wallet is the end of anonymous shopping? No, if you don't want to be tracked by Google Wallet, just don't use Google Wallet. If you want to stay anonymous, use cash.

And wear a hat.
And gloves.
And a fake mustache.

As of earlier today, the law's main sponsor, Dan Patrick, R-Houston, said the law is dead after support for the law collapsed.

http://www.click2houston.com/news/28032459/detail.html

For a guy who's claiming that college impedes innovation, Peter Thiel sure had a lot of it. He has a BA in Philosophy and a Juris Doctor from Stanford.