Visual Studio Express is Microsoft's zero-cash programming environment. Why do you want a high-cost office suite with a lousy macro engine to be discounted to free when they already offer their actual development suite pro bono. It's upgradeable to more complete Visual Studio versions later. This will encourage Microsoft-centric code, but that can be avoided and it's less specific of a tie-in than VBA. C#, C, C++, and more are included.

If you don't want to be tied to Microsoft-specific tools even on Windows there are other options. Those include other office suites and other actual development tools.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have OOBasic and can be scripted with Python and Java if you really want. These things are zero-cash and open source.

You can use Lazarus and FreePascal (Wikipedia article about FreePascal) or Eclipse and Java/C/C++ if you'd rather. Or you could use Eric and Python. Or Padre and Strawberry Perl, complete with MinGW. Some of the IDEs are more or less general and language agnostic, while others are mainly narrowly targeted.

Don't forget MsysGit (git for Windows) if you're not using Cygwin and haven't already chosen a version control system.

Really, you could be teaching with a good programmer's editor rather than specifically with IDEs too. vim, Emacs, jEdit, Gedit, and others are applicable. Some of them are powerful enough to make that line between editors and IDEs very fuzzy.

What, exactly, would a free copy of Word get you that isn't already available?

Hell, you can get a decent non-enthusiast desktop with the new operating system for under $400 now. What people should be bitching about is how much hassle it still is for the average non-geek to get the applications from the old XP machine to the new shiny 7 or 8 machine with settings intact.

Actually OS X is free now if you own the hardware. The hardware is expensive, though.

In the US there's a good chance that medical office software mentioned needs to be upgraded by October to deal with ICD-10 anyway. Anyone who does that large of a code change and still won't support a newer operating system than XP needs to not be writing software that stores medical data.

P is things known to be solvable in polynomial time on a classical computer. NP is things that may be solvable on a classical computer in polynomial time given some discovery we've not yet made. Therefore NP may be (but probably isn't) a subset of P.

See the subject.

NP-Hard is not the same thing as NP-Complete the last time I checked. Neither is NP yet known to be non-P nor P. That's why it's NP (nondeterministic polynomial). P would never be equal to NP. NP may be a subset of P. There are problems that are both NP-hard and NP-complete, but not all NP-hard problems are NP-complete. That means that solving one NP-hard problem is not necessarily equivalent to solving the NP-complete problem set.

Houston, for one, so long as you're one of the first few cars at the light.

It would also make higher-alcohol distiller's beer available so less energy has to go into distilling for hard liquor or for fuel alcohol.

In your dream world you'd involve two huge government bureaucracies when one accomplished the recall without the other? I can see handing off from one to the other if they were still causing the problem and the first agency was unable to change the behavior. Maybe we should think a bit before pulling in all the coordination costs up front though when they may not be necessary.

No, the government doesn't decide how many car dealerships for a manufacturer there are in a region. That's between the manufacturer and the dealers.

"The widespread franchise rules giving car dealers virtual monopolies in their territories epitomize the government-controlled marketplace Republicans purportedly despise". No. The regulation we're talking about here is whether or not car dealers can ban direct manufacturer-to-consumer sales. There is no government regulation of which I'm aware on geographical monopoly areas for dealerships.

In states that ban direct sales of cars to consumers there's an enforced oligopoly of dealers for new cars. It is nothing close to a monopoly. There is a distinct difference.

I doubt your claim that "most [...] educational institutions" have access to Windows source code. I'd really like to see documentation for such a bold claim.

I'm also not sure why my post was modded flamebait for pointing out that Microsoft found bugs in someone's open platform (which happens to be the competition they currently appear most worried about) but that their own model precludes that. Are you saying that Google has access to Windows Phone's source? I'd like documentation of that, too.

Think of all the help Microsoft could get spotting security flaws if Google and Stanford could look through the Windows source whenever they chose.

Why? I'm not the dolt who asks for details about people's jobs when they're trying to relax and enjoy the company of others. I'm the guy bemoaning being asked those questions by said dolts. ;-)

"Hack" as a language name? Really?

People are going to explain this at dinner parties. People who kind of understand that programming is more than being good at operating a computer as an end user but don't really know the difference between sysadmin, devops, programmer, business analyst, and DBA let alone what those roles really do are going to ask questions. Those questions will be things like "what kind of programming?", "what technologies do you use?", and "what are you working on right now?" The answer will be something about putting together a quick Hack program to change values in a database, and then it gets awkward.

Plus, did they consider at all how easily this will get confused with Haxe?

I remember a time when drugs weren't particularly marketed in big-budget TV campaigns directly to patients. Hell, I don't think telling a patient which drugs to try before they go to the doctor is a particularly good idea. A TV can't make a diagnosis. Why are we allowing them to drive up costs for giving non-specific medical advice to people who probably don't even have the conditions for which the drugs are being pushed?