People still use C? Really?

I think this'll collapse unless Sony decide to open it to PC and maybe other consoles. It's not something that is general-use enough to bundle it with every console they sell, and there's not been a truly successful aftermarket add-on for a console as game manufacturers don't include support for them.

I was supporting Oculus until the FB buyout, and then I looked to Sony as maybe they'd treat this as a general display device rather than a PS4-exclusive (You can plug an XBox into a Sony Bravia), but now I'm just hoping Valve wake up and Do Stuff with a few of Gabe's millions.

LESS is a CSS pre-processor, adding useful things such as variables and extensions to the syntax without breaking things as it compiles down to vanilla CSS at the end. http://lesscss.org/

As Carl Sagan said, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe".

Over the last few years 3d printing has come on dramatically, it's great for rapid prototyping.

Unfortunately though the average home user doesn't really have much need for rapid prototyping, and most of the things which come out of current 3d printers just don't look polished enough to appeal. They're still very rough looking, more the type of thing which'd come out of a Christmas cracker than the type of thing most people would want as decor.

In terms of software I don't think a more user-friendly 3d editor will help too much. I view 3d product design as similar to writing software, you can make it more accessible but most people are just going to be interested in the library of things other people have developed. Make a library of designs which the average person (not the average current 3d printer owner, they're more enthusiast) will find interesting, attractive, and useful and maybe you'll break the mainstream- until then it's the realm of the tinkerer and the hacker. Most people don't need or want a print out of the Stanford rabbit.

I'm not saying this isn't of interest or use, I may have pledged for one myself if I didn't find paying the import duties to the UK to be so painful (Anyone want to Kickstart a business importing other business' Kickstarters?), but it's still just another 3d printer. I don't think it's the type of thing I'd be recommending to my parents and neighbours though, I just don't think they'd want to deal with the hassles that 3d printers currently bring in exchange for the benefits. How much 3d printing do most people actually need?

What I do see as becoming more popular is the shared printer. People at home make orders for larger and well-finished 3d objects selected from a catalogue and printed on a very nice printer, and they either post them or make them available for collection at central points. I know businesses like Shapeways do this already but the price isn't right for most people yet, it needs to be the case where printing a vase isn't that much more expensive than buying one, and printing a piece to fix your plumbing should be easily affordable.

Do you really expect any company to donate 'rival' equipment to schools? What I would really rather see MS do is to not cancel development of things such as XNA Game Studio, or at to give more support to other freely-available game engines. Game development is something that kids do enjoy. Make it easy for them to quickly and easily write games using proper programming languages, run them on their own devices, and share them with friends, and you stand a chance of actually getting a programmer out of the other side.

Agreed. People end up using things such as VBA because they spend a lot of time using MS Office and want to automate part of it, they don't do it for fun. If people want to get kids excited about programming then Excel will not help.

As you say stuff like Python/Ruby will as they're nice languages and web development is something people can have fun with, and I'd also throw in stuff like mobile development which seems to still be viewed with interest, Javascript which is an oddly odd language but allows a lot of cool web things, and nowadays freely available game engines.

The teachers do generally know about this, and a lot of them will share it with the kids.

Is this still the case nowadays though? Wouldn't the classmates just get the listings themselves from the Internet?

No, not mmmkay.

You feel that proprietary software software has no place in the schools, others have different views. I personally would prefer free software to be more heavily used in schools but can see a strong benefit from teaching children the software they're likely to be using in their later careers, and often this will be proprietary. For teaching programming I'd likely stick to free software, but for word processing and so on I'd go with Microsoft's suite as when applying for a lot of jobs not having any experience at all with MS Office will be a fairly strong negative.

To be honest given the changes from Windows 7 to Windows 8 I don't think MS cares about MS' interface any more.

On the Kickstarter's page the video has a segment with Peter Dickinson, the original Industrial Designer for the Spectrum, and so I assume that either he was just happy to see his work get a new life or is receiving money himself from the Kickstarter. Basically if he's happy for his work to be used like this so am I, although I do assume similar agreements have been made with other SInclair folks up to and including Sir Slive.

The people behind the Kickstarter seem to be defaulting on agreements to pay royalties to the developers of the games they're bundling, and not really responding well to questions asking them why, which isn't a great start.

The feeling you've never been here before actually exists, it's called 'Jamais Vu' and is a seriously weird experience.

USB tokens won't work at the moment, too many people accessing the internet using phones and tablets without USB ports.