Let's see... give a bunch of college students a $99 license for Visual Basic 6.0 after it had been out for a year and what results on the campus of Syracuse University?

For a blow-by-blow account, check your Slashdot archives.

Take the news seriously! They magically moved from "the moon" to "the bag" which his widow hasn't touched in 20 years... wait a minute!

Passing a law like this with a 90 wait would mean the course wouldn't be ready until next school year.

Just like the way they teach science and history, it's a group reading of a textbook and having a computer in front of you to test theories. I've sat through 4 of them. (6th Grade Applesoft Basic, 9th Grade QBasic, 10th Grade Pascal, Freshman College level C) They all teach the same concepts like sorting, even though most people these days ask a database program to do sorting work with an ORDER BY command in SQL.

When I was in high school, we learned QBasic on IBM PS/2s. What's the current equivalent today? Nobody's completed the .net help file, so who has the book to teach it?

In state legislatures, an "emergency" declares a law in effect immediately, waiving off the tradition 90-day-or-so notices.

This seems to be as well planned as an STS-33... we've got Slashdot matching The Onion, and quoting telegraph.co.UK... how does a news site that ends in UK become the leader on this story?

You're starting to rate "nominal" around here... remember what that means when NASA says that!

There's a reason why most collections of facts don't touch the 1960s... too much fiction in the news back then. Sorry, this story doesn't belong on Slashdot!

If you're browser-only... why do you need Windows? Linux/Chromium seems able to handle that.

Google's got something ahead of the antivirus vendors... they're paying to prevent the hole from being open rather than setting up to block what comes in the hole. Chrome's main problem has been "feature not implemented" rather than takeovers that were seen in the early days of Internet Explorer. ChromeOS products are looking to be cheap user machines, and there's yet to be a need for antivirus there.

Factor the price of an antivirus subscription into every Windows machine you're running, and maybe non-programming businesses could switch to Google products in place of Windows.

Monopoly? In most places, they face competition from the phone company.

Actually, Comcast already merged with AT&T Broadband, while the rest of AT&T went bankrupt piece by piece. The current AT&T is really what SBC used to be.

Comcast is the cable TV provider of most systems from Maine to New Jersey, and is attempting to merge with Time Warner Cable.

Yep... Inkscape is the answer to the open source bitmap editor GIMP... mix the two programs and you have the complete feature list of Photoshop!