When I was 12, I actually started teaching myself programming with TI-BASIC on a school-supplied graphing calculator. HTML and GW-BASIC quickly followed, then it was on to Visual Basic and C++. If I were to do it again today, though, I'd probably start with Python—it's easy to learn and can do great stuff. I would certainly steer clear of things like Alice and HTML, which don't really teach the fundamentals of programming very well.

Really. I read the complaint, and it sounds pretty leak-proof, but don't you think they should be suing the manufacturers of the products, instead of the poor retail stores? Because really—what could Best Buy do about this? Not sell stuff? No, the manufacturer should be made to include the GPL in the manual of the affected products, with a link to where one can download the source code. I think that would be fair. As it stands, though, I think they should go through with the lawsuit, and bring it to the attention of the public that Free Software (as in Freedom) is not something rare and unclean, but something that none of us could live without in modern life.

Both rovers have been in this same sort of situation before. The first time it happened, NASA took a full-scale model out into their back yard to test various methods of getting them out. They've gotten the rovers out of sand before, they can do it again.

Definitely!

My upgrade has been quite painless, though that might be because I simply did a fresh install. My hardware is fairly old (Athlon XP processor, 1GB RAM) and Karmic is running quite well. Conky works, OpenGL works, Flash works, etc. The only thing that tripped me up was the switch to GRUB2, which left me, like many others, wondering where "menu.lst" went.

I voted Work/School Related, because that's closest to Wikipedia for me (though teachers hate it). Considering I use it so often, I always set Wikipedia to my home page.

I agree. I doubt Apple would actually implement advertising in their OS because their customer loyalty is based on good service since their customers pay a premium. If Apple gets this patent and doesn't use it, then no one else would be able either (without Apple's permission).

It's a joke. Period. Physicists have a sense of humor too, and the whole community is laughing at our sorry butts for falling for it. The two physicists that are perpetrating this joke seem more like pranksters than crackpots to me. On the other hand, it was a very well-played joke.

Lulz. I thought the same thing.

Without grep, your *nix would be almost useless. Without init, you *nix would be useless, because it wouldn't start up, just sit there on your hard drive taking up space.

I write plenty of stuff in my own notebooks (not school-related, think da Vinci), but I never use cursive. Heck, I have a hard time reading cursive. I could probably write in cursive if I had to, but I prefer well-shaped, articulate letters rather than a mess of loops.

sudo apt-get install
Out of the choices, though, init is the most useful because it starts my system.

Not impressed with Haiku. Linux ftw.