by Robert A. Heinlein postulated a solar cell that would emit light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... The story came at it from the opposite direction -- a lighting panel that turned out to also work as a photovoltaic cell. Heinlein's story was published in 1940. Only took 3/4 of a century for engineering to catch up with science fiction.

But the goal of OLPC wasn't to teach programming but rather to provide a programmable platform that was good for teaching. As a contributor to the OLPC activities library, I'm a little sad to see the project die "not with a bang but a whimper". (My contribution was a set of four programs that taught the night sky.)

I started programming 45 years ago. Over the years, I've learned to write code in about 12 languages, six of them professionally. I coded in PL/1, Fortran, BASIC, lisp, Pascal, Ada, FORTH, C, C++, Delphi, Java, Python and a bunch of assembly and shell script languages. I admit that I find it harder to learn a new language nowadays but some of that is because the languages have become more complex. It's been about five years since I had to learn a new language (that one was Python), so I expect I'll be teaching myself something new soon -- and I'm 65. So, I guess I'd have to say you have no excuse not to study another language.

I was born in 1948, so I grew up in the era of the "space race". Back then -- at least in the suburban public school system I attended -- the system did emphasize academics for those who scored above average on the standardized tests. (Not that it prevented us nerds from being excluded from the social circles that courted the football jocks.) Science club, math club -- we had them. Local, regional, state and national science and math fairs were common and us over-achievers were expected to participate. AP science, math and English were offered. Yes, the system wasn't as PC as today. But most of the kids who graduated from high school could at least name all the planets in order of distance from the sun.

Except its those over-65-ers like myself who grew up in the glory days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo who are NASA's biggest fans. So your proposal would be self-defeating, I think.

How many who could correctly define astronomy still believe that it can be used to predict your future. Because that's astrophysics.

on coming up with an acronym and not enough on proper planning and execution. This seems to be an endemic problem with our government. Beaurocracy at its best!

This is an app that exploits a security hole to detect apps that are exploiting a security hole? What's wrong with this picture?

In his novel Time is the Simplest Thing, he wrote [paraphrasing] the human body was not cut out for space travel, a man dies to easily from radiation when passing through the Van Allen belts. This was written in 1961 -- just after the Van Allen belts were discovered and just before the first manned spaceflight.

On the other hand, Facebook might be more like a cold -- something that everybody dislikes but cannot entirely avoid.

Saw this article just after reading this one:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/...

It's a sad day. He did so much to advance the art of telescope making and to make the night sky accessible to everyone.

Perhaps a fitting memorial would be a national "dark skies" law, so that we all can have a night sky worth looking up for.

Insanity -> mad -> M.A.D. -> mutually assured destruction. There's definitely a connection here.

It's not like this should be news to anybody. Humans have been throwing rocks at each other for thousands of generations. We've just gotten better at it lately.

So I keep all my credentials written down in a Rolodex file. And I lock the file in a safe. This strategy has saved me no end of grief already. The most-frequently used creds I can remember; the more infrequently-used ones I have to access by one level of indirection. I figure if I forget the combination to the safe, I can always hire a locksmith. This also solves the problem of how your estate handles things like your on-line assets: your executor might need to access your accounts and everything is already organized to do so.