A decent quality scientific calculator and enough training with it that they can start using to discover the joys of solving problems. I think I had my first solar powered scientific calc when I was about ten. A handful of years later in high school I moved up to a more complicated graphing model. I'm sad to say I don't have the original calculator but I still have the latter. It served me well through high school, college admissions exams, and then a bachelors degree in the sciences. Of course these days I write boring but comparatively lucrative line of business web apps, so the most complicated math I ever have reason to do can be done with gcalctool in simple mode. ;) I still feel a bit of a rush when I look at my old calc though; we had such times together. :D

I won't get into the emacs-vs-vi wars of TI/HP/whatever, but get them a solid useful tool that can be used for most any science endeavor and you'll have done them a favor, imho.

(And yeah this might not be appropriate for the 7 year old, but I'd wager the 9 year old is mature enough or on the cusp of it...)

I saw this earlier on another site which included a screen-cap, wherein there was a $20 Negative Balance Fee shown after the huge erroneous charge, so it would seem that it did trigger issues on the business logic level.

Not all uses of sex selection are for social reasons. For example, I am male and have an X-chromosomal genetic disorder that I'd very much like to avoid giving to any of my (as yet purely hypothetical) children. Ergo, for my putative offspring to be healthy [or at least avoid the disorder I've been afflicted with], they would have to be male as well. So it might be appropriate to look at things with a bit more of a nuanced view than "it's absolutely evil and should be totally banned."

starting to think "D" in DRM stands for "Doomed" and "Dickheaded" more than "Digital". Customers may on average be pretty fucking dumb, but even the truly dense will feel themselves getting screwed if you do it hard enough, and the content cartel just can't ever quite seem to figure out how far they can push things. If by some outlandish chance this moves from "patent application" to "products on shelves", I expect that it'll die on the vine just as badly as the movie industry's attempt at obnoxious tetherware (DivX) did ten years ago.

The idea that giving loans to THOSE PEOPLE (implicitly poor, black, and whatever other qualities our society is calling moral failings this week) is behind the collapse of the financial industry and had nothing whatsoever to do with the saintly finance industry's business practices itself is a meme that really needs to bite the dust. Was CRA part of the problem? Maybe, but there's no such thing as a single cause to a collective fuckup/fiscal meltdown of this magnitude. I'd argue that the repeal of Glass-Steagall is an even larger singular driver.

I'm sorry if it seems like I'm singling you out or jumping down your throat in particular, I'm just real tired of simplistic finger-pointing at the CRA. (I even vaguely recall seeing numbers that said CRA-driven loans were actually less likely than average to be in foreclosure, but it's been a good while and I can't remember where to dig up the particular citation.)

The last administration was interested in unilateral projection of policy and access to resources moreso than flag planting, an ideological and commercial empire more than one of borders. As regards oil, I'd argue that it was never about cheap oil (another common red herring in this discussion) as it was access to oil in light of ongoing demographic shifts in the southern Arabian peninsula. As for control over oil supplies, consider this: which was the first ministry occupied by Coalition forces in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion? Which company was given total operating rights on Iraqi oil fields in May of 2003 lasting until 2007?

It's a broad brush, admittedly, but generally entertainment and non-defense technology have their leashes on the Democrats and oil/defense/defense-tech have their leashes on Republicans. When GWB was elected I thought that I should have gone out and bought up shares in defense and oil, only I was a poor college kid at the time, and history I think well illustrates how those bets would have paid off 2000-2008. All things considered, yes it's disappointing that this Democratic administration will likely pander to the above corporate interests, but I'll take DRM and p2p stupidity over bloody oil wars and dreams of empire any day and twice on Sunday.

Nearly identical copy and paste from an amazon review (with parts of another), eliding potential negatives like pointers to a competing book and this text not being useful (in that reviewer's opinion) for academia.

Whew, that's a level of whoosh I'm having a hard time distinguishing from trolling, but I'll make a go at explaining it. I'm not talking about workplace discrimination (which is a separate evil that I will leave aside for brevity), I'm talking about the laws of the society itself being altered by bigots to discriminate against a group of citizens. In my mind Prop 8 is functionally indistinguishable from the anti-mixed-race-marriage laws of the last century, which aptly met their demise in the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia.

Now I'm sure the nimrod brigade will respond with "BUT DUH STDDEV, WHY NO WORKPLACE IF GOOGLE COMPANY WORK WORK WORKPLACE DUH PC DUHHHHHH????". Let me try to fill in the very short lines and dots here: Google is a company whose primary operations are in California. If California passes laws that negatively impact the civil liberties of current or potential Google employees, Google is an interested party in trying to get those laws repealed because it places an artificial restraint on their already difficult job of finding the cream of the computing crop to solve hard problems. That supporting the efforts to repeal Prop 8 is a morally correct decision is just icing on the cake, from a business standpoint.

At least in my admittedly somewhat limited experience. I was looking for a full-timer gig last spring and it came down to Google and another place. Google wanted me to move to Cali for three months at the start of any engagement with them (I guess to give the kool-aid 90 days to work ;)). I got the impression that they were not very flexible about that, either (maybe it's different for international offices? I'm on the east coast of the US). So I can easily see the argument that the laws and environment of California would have a strong effect on their hiring operations, if the above is in fact par for the course.

Seriously? Jesus, try not to be completely dense. Imagine for a second that you have polka-dot skin, and place you'd like to work for happens to be in Plaidlandia, where people with polka-dot skin are reviled and discriminatory laws are written into the books against them. Would you take the job in Plaidlandia?

You can fill in other involuntary attributes, places, and such above as needed until a light dawns in your head. (The part of me that thinks that subtly is lost on the clueless really wants to mutter something about being a Jewish, German-speaking chemist in 1933 and immigrating to Germany here, but that seems over the top. :P)

Hell, I'm as straight as an arrow and Prop 8 gives me pause regards moving to silicon valley. I left Texas partially because I was tired of my work and income supporting an economy full of bigots with a government happy to cater to them, and moving to where a pile of assholes just wrote discrimination (of any sort, regardless of whether I would be affected by it) into their state constitution isn't high on my list of Good Moves.

As a professional developer with about a decade of commercial experience, I can assure you that you won't be writing code all day in many jobs. You'll spend at least half your time writing TPS report coversheets, attending meetings, writing reports about attending meetings, attending meetings about reports, and occasionally meetings about meetings or reports about reports. Figuring out how to answer the latest hare-brained question from the suits with the shitty data to hand (abortions of SQL and/or one-off hacks with a scripting language go here) takes up another twenty-five percent of your time. Twenty percent to thinking about lunch, eye-balling the hot MOTAS in Accounting or HR, sneaking in the side entrance so Lumbergh doesn't see you, and you're looking at five percent of your time going to real actual coding/work.

You may think I'm pulling your leg, and you also probably laugh rather than cry when you read Dilbert. Don't worry, by the time you graduate you'll probably be old enough to legally drink and that really helps take the edge off.

Hope that helps! :D

If I understand the grand-parent post and this space in general correctly, think things like BigTable at google or open-source implementations like Hypertable or HBase.