Well, in the case of Linux, it appears the answer is: "constant in-fighting and general incompetence." Next question? I'm an expert at these ones!

I agree that Visual Basic .NET is a lot less "learnable" (for lack of a better word) than old-school Visual Basic.

But what feature do you think the Express version of Visual Studio lacks for this use? (Ignoring for a moment that students generally can get a full version of VS for very cheap or free through their school.) Why the all-caps on the word "FULL"?

Hell, from my experience, most actual dev shops don't even use the FULL ("Ultimate") version of Visual Studio, the standard edition is fine for 99.9% of use-cases.

Would Microsoft want to get kids hooked into nice wholesome activities like MS-SQL, C#, .net or VB

They already give away all that. Plus a restriction-free copy of Visual Studio, to boot. They have been for decades. Your FUD is decades out-of-date and I hate you.

Should Microsoft be forced to support XP? Should Microsoft give kids Office? Should Microsoft start making hybrid cars out of farm waste?

Maybe a better question should be: does any decision-maker at Microsoft give a tenth of a fuck about what any Slashdot poster has to say? I'm wagering the answer to that one is: no.

That's complete nonsense; if true, it would mean nearly every piece of commercial software was fraud, from office software to image editing software to antivirus software.

It is. As a manufacturer you have to machete your way through a jungle of red tape, get all manner of safety assessments etc. to even be allowed to install the ADSC-B/C equipment on the aircraft. This is very time consuming and expensive, which is one reason why all aircraft avionics and generally anything that goes into an aircraft is by definition obscenely expensive to buy (right down to LCD screens and coffee makers) and why old airliner designs get reworked (it's a smaller bureaucratic workload to get a new variant of an existing design flying than a totally new design). If this seems like dumb bureaucracy keep in mind that aircraft have been lost to crappy installation of retrofitted electronics (a good example being Swissair Flight 111). To install the equipment your airline has to ground the aircraft for at least a week (installation costs and lost revenue). Depending on the type of aircraft you operate and its age there may not even have been provision for the ADSC-B/C equipment which means airframe modifications and more downtime (yet more lost revenue and expenses) followed by more certifications and inspections. On top of that different ATC areas sometimes require you to have different equipment. Even simple stuff like software upgrades only happen at a glacial pace so if you think that fixing a simple software bug on an airliner is as simple as downloading an install package from the support section of the Boeing/Airbus website, uploading it to your USB stick, plugging it into a USB socket in the dashboard of your Boeing 777 airliner and selecting "Update firmware" on the FMS screen you have another thing coming. Airliners are one of the safest modes of transportation but that comes at a cost in time and money.

Is that a good idea? He was dangerous enough with a shotgun, he will be a walking disaster when he can shoot laser beams form his eyes.

It seems to me that the root of the Fukushima disaster was the decision to build a nuclear power plant in a place where there was even the remotest chance of Tsunami damage. The government of a country whose history is littered with Tsunami disasters should have known better. The design basis for tsunamis at Fukushima was 5.7 meters, it should have been: "Don't build a nuclear plant within 20-30km of the coast and even then put it on high ground" and keep in mind that this restriction does not account for earthquakes although the Fukushima plant survived a magnitude 7.7 quake rather well so at least in that regard it was better designed..

What stopped you from upgrading to Windows 7 anytime in literally the last 4 years? ... for that matter, what's stopping you from upgrading to Windows 7 tomorrow?

Generally I agree with you and I can see your point with corded headphones but cordless (Bluetooth) ones work fine for me. I used to go through a ton of corded headphones. Usually they'd wear out due to metal fatigue just above the plug to save money. For years I used to shorten the chord and solder it back to the plug like a true penny pinching geek. Then I finally gave up and spent an obscene amount of money on a set of Sennheiser MM 550-X Bluetooth headphones. So far they have, well .... just worked. I also have a couple of sets of Sennheiser MM200 earplugs phones, also Bluetooth. Same story here, they just work. The first set finally wore out after three years of daily use so I bought a second one on sale since this model is out of production now. The only complaint I have so far is that the audio quality suffers a bit because of the Bluetooth link but not so much that I'd forgo the comfort of being wireless.

Speaking of special purpose devices, what I'd really like for safety reasons is a __proper__ HUD for my car. There are after market ones but most of the suck, a HUD should be standard equipment in every car.

I don't care, this is a good idea. I installed a dash cam in my car. It's just a HD webcam hooked up to a board computer that runs a C++ daemon using the OpenCV libraries but I have already captured some rather spectacular footage. Including a car that had gone off the road in icy conditions, there was a light post which the car had sheared off it's mounting resting on the car's roof (I arrived at the scene post facto). A couple of days ago I captured another bit off scary footage when I had to drive onto the shoulder of the road to avoid a frontal collision with a guy who decided it was a good idea to overhaul three other cars on blind turn in the road. If this keeps up I'll set up a YouTube channel and a website that uses the footage as a library of examples for student drivers of how not to drive.

They can include a dash cam and side view cameras as well along with an interface that allows me to copy filmed material to an SD card or something... That would have saved me twice from getting stuck with being 50 percent at fault (both times the other driver ignored a red light).

Anybody who claims that has never been to Russia. There are other countries in Europe where corruption is rife but from talking with people who have done business there, Russia is like the wild west (along with Belarus and the Ukraine). One guy I talked to called Russia a "kleptocracy". Take a look at this map of perceived corruption around the world:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
High index is clean, a low one is corrupt. As you can see much of Eastern Europe (i.e. ex Warsaw pact) is at least two steps up from Russia. And the USA is perceived as being about as corrupt as Western Europe (i.e. W-Europe more or less as it is defied by Eurovoc).

Fox New: If it hurts big coal and oil, try to convince everybody it doesn't exist.

So it's OK to abuse monopolies in any way you want just as long as you don't use them to extort money from people? If there was real competition on the search market, if there were 5-10 different search providers that all more or less equally divided the market between them I'd be perfectly inclined to agree with you because then you could choose a provider that wasn't run by a bunch of reactionary morons. The whole problem is precisely that Google is a private company that has acquired the same position as a and role as public utility by virtue of their monopoly on internet searches. They have a stranglehold on what has become the primary communications platform of the 21st century and thus there are severe limitations on the political filters they are allowed to apply to their search result. We are bloody lucky Google is run by a couple of intellectuals who have for the most part not abused their position and made the concious choice not to push their political agenda with the same unrelenting and ruthless political partisanship as Fox News does. Both conservatives and liberals have benefited from that. Would you rather have the gatekeeper of internet search controlled and run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch or the Koch brothers?