My first programming language (5 years old, 1985) was Apple BASIC. Online interpreter:

http://www.quitebasic.com/

When I was in 3rd grade, we programmed in LogoWriter. Looks like there is a web-based LOGO interpreter here:

http://turtleacademy.com/

Next, I learned PASCAL.

http://www.compileonline.com/c...

None of that stuff is OOP (although imperative is still a very important paradigm).

Once you want to move past kiddie stuff, I'd set her down with a C# IDE (the free-as-in-beer Visual Studio edition or the free-as-in-really-free MonoDevelop) and some YouTube tutorials.

Andi Graph is the bomb... you can switch between any TI-8x ROMs. The only thing I miss about it is the tactile keys.

I own a TI-85. Therefore, I have no remorse about using the TI-85 ROM on my Android devices, as I'm not letting anyone use my calculator at the same time. I paid for the software.

In conjunction with BlueStacks on my Samsung ATIV Pro 900T, I can even project and take screenshots of the whole calculator without any special TI hardware.

https://play.google.com/store/...

VirtualBox

I'm a parent of four precocious kids in a small college town in the mountains of NC.

We have taxpayer-funded public transportation here. 12 years old and up are allowed to ride the bus alone (to go to the library, etc). Would I let my 7-year old if he were allowed? No. Would I let him go with his 12-year-old brother who has a way to stay in touch with me? Probably.

I don't think the issue here is automotive safety. A fully-automated car should be safe enough for kids to ride in by themselves, or it shouldn't be on the road. I think the bigger concern is, when is it okay to let your kids out in public without supervision? 72% of the people who said flat out "no" did so because they have the impression that parents should be attached to their children at the hip, or because there was no option for, say, 15 and up. Maybe kids should be able to earn the freedom of being out without their parents with good grades above a certain age, etc. The survey sucked. There should have been an option for unlicensed adolescents but not younger children, etc. Parental consent and discretion should be part of the equation as well. We're the ones responsible for our kids, and with that responsibility should come some discretion on our part.

On a side note, I think autonomous cars will reduce the need for us to go out for non-social things. I mean, aside from losing the ability to pick the best produce, I certainly wouldn't mind telling my car to make a run to the grocery store for me. For me, shopping is just time I'd rather spend with my family.

Most of the non-OpenSSL instances of TLS implementations out there are probably SChannel.

I would be shocked if Microsoft hadn't had equally severe bugs, and further surprised if they could fix them as fast.

POS Ready 2009 *is* Windows XP SP3 with a cheaper license ($99).
If you can get your hands on it, it's supported until 2019. Since end of support is 2019, they should still be providing security updates...
https://www.microsoft.com/wind...
They may be killing XP, but not it's lesser known twin.

Put bar code labels on everything with the asset identifiers.
Make a simple web app that authenticates to the LDAP server (you don't even have to write the auth part - Apache will handle that for you). The app will have two basic functions: start using asset and stop using asset.
They will touch one function or the other and enter the asset ID to generate a log entry.
Write an iOS native wrapper app for it using UIWebView and ZBar, to let them scan the asset tag using the camera on their phone.
Leave a $170 iPod touch in the lab for anyone who doesn't have an iPhone, so they don't feel left out.
If desired, automate sending nag messages to people who forgot to log stopping the use of something. Give them a way to enter corrections with a web form.
Provide your bean counters with a suitable report, preferably something that exports to their favorite bean counting app's format (I'd probably use the free Crystal Java Runtime just because I know it).

It can be made generic enough to get app store approval.

Done.

Cost to implement: 2 weeks of my time - negotiable.

There is an upside to logging stuff like this besides satisfying the beanies... you also have data to justify new purchase requests.

This is a parroting of a marketing-derived press release. Move along. I think I'm going to move along. Thanks for the memories, Slashdot.

You do realize, in the post-Snowden era, that the NSA probably already forwarded your Slashdot submission along with your social security number and those of your 8 closest relatives to the RIAA, dont you? :-P

That's about the silliest thing I've heard today. A television screen, even in 1984, was probably a computer monitor. Granted it was NTSC, but around that time most televisions were switched over to digital tuners (which are computers).

I mean, I'm a computer programmer, and I spend my day working in Visual Studio, vim, and NetBeans (depending on what I'm doing). By that logic, I never see a computer either, at least not the one I'm working on. I spend most of my day in an RDP session on a retired tradeshow 27" iMac. I have to touch xcode once in a while, but I mostly keep it for the real estate.

Animated PNG support is terrible... see:

http://caniuse.com/apng

No IE, no Chrome, Opera dropped it when they went to Webkit, no iPhone, no Android...
looks like it's pretty much only available on 20%ish of desktop browsers and pretty much nothing mobile. You aren't going to get anyone to use it in a public-facing web application yet. Remember the days of "this site looks best in (Internet Explorer/Netscape/whatever)"... let's not do that again.

Maybe if the HTML 5 standard said that conforming user agents have to do this it would put a little more umph behind it. Of course, the standard seems to follow browser development in many cases now, not the other way around.

"...I'm planning to do a cross-country trip quite soon with a car..."

Just a bit of advice I got from my sister this March after she and her husband drove from Boulder, CO to Decatur, IL:

"Never accidentally drive across Kansas. It's surprisingly wide."

I'm a QA analyst for a software company. My workplace is saturated with WiFi. My wife has a cheap-but-has-everything-she-wants HTC One V (Android ICS) with prepaid Virgin Moble. I live 0.75 miles from my home, which is also saturated with WiFi. I get by on just an iPod Touch 4, with vTok for calls between me and my wife. We have $7/mo voip service at home for a pseudo-landline, but I bet I could put a client on the iPod if I wanted to.

Behold the phaser.

Progress bars do not make sequences of actions complete any faster. In fact, they make them slower.

That being said, take for example an installer that must perform the following steps during an upgrade:

0. Figure out how many files need to be replaced.
1. Replace 30 files of varying sizes.
2. Add 10 files.
3. Update a half million rows inn a table with a million rows setting a column to a computed value based on some predicates.
4. Run a third party installation mechanism (MSM?) for a supporting library, etc.

Modern computers are time-sharing systems. Each process that involves computation is at the mercy of the scheduler in the kernel to give it the cycles it needs to complete. That means that even if you measure the time it takes to complete some process, it's not going to be the same a second time, because the installation process doesn't get undivided attention.

Steps 0 - 2 - you're at the mercy of the IO buses, hard disk, antivirus software interfering, etc.
Step 3 - What shape are the database statistics in? How efficiently can you apply the predicates? What does the distribution of the data look like? You can't tell this ahead of time...
Step 4 - Does this third party installer provide you some sort of metrics as it runs?

These are the sorts of problems to be overcome to do an accurate progress bar. In short, they aren't worth overcoming.