Don't forget that the primary reason for the existence of Apple Inc is to facilitate the orderly and systematic transfer of money from the bank accounts of bored yuppies to the account of Steven Jobs.
That was priceless... and probably hits a little close to home for me these days.
As a youth programming C64s in BASIC and a little ASM, part of the appeal was being able to make programs (e.g. games) that weren't too far off in complexity/polish from commercial offerings. Nobody was interested that you could fill the screen with "I LIKE BUTTS", but having a joystick controlled sprite character wandering around shooting things was kind of cool.
I wonder if a better equivalent today would be writing Javascript/HTML in a web browser, or perhaps flash. Much as when I was doing PEEK and POKE in BASIC while pro developers were doing crazy hand-coded assembly hacks to get ultimate performance, the same relationship could exist between Javascript or Actionscript versus C++. Just as cutting my teeth in BASIC helped lay a foundation to eventually learn C/C++ and become a professional software developer, this might be how the next generation will start out. For a kid, getting something interesting to happen when they code is probably the most important thing to get them hooked.
From what I recall of the iPhone/iPad restrictions would allow some sort of web development app to be created as long as it used the Webkit Javascript runtime. I'm not a web developer so I could be way off, but I suspect that even with Apple's restrictions there could be some pretty cool stuff for budding programmers on an iPad. Also, there's no reason Apple couldn't make an iPad version of Xcode that would have the same restrictions as the regular iPad SDK ($99/yr contract, only run on developer iPads, require App Store approval for public release). I think a $499 iPad plus $99/yr is still considerably cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars than a C64 was in 1984 (>$1200 in todays dollars).
I've build a couple of internal GUI tools at work, and I see this all the time among my less-technical coworkers--they just click Ok on anything that pops up without reading it, even if it's an error message, and then come and ask me why is something not working. It's a problem of too many apps crying wolf with too many needless popups and confirmation boxes that have trained people, but it's also just the nature of most people just to keep clicking on different things semi-randomly until they get the result they wanted.
I think the only real solution is better UI design--make things work the way people expect them to, make doing the right thing seem easier and more obvious than doing the wrong thing, try to make dangerous things more buried away, etc.
Probably the only good time to use a popup box if it is a failure state where the app just can't do what is requested, where even if they close the box, they'll keep trying it again and getting the box again, eventually they might read it.
This is one of the things I prefer about OS X, in that it seems much more "quiet" with far fewer popups, flashing task tray notifications, etc. The one exception is the way the System Update icon just keeps bouncing up and down if it has a new update--it would be nice if after ten seconds it would switch to a less annoying animation, or maybe just bounce every now and then, so that if you're in the middle of reading an article or something, you don't feel like you have a two-year-old tugging your pant leg.
" Cold fusion, the ability to generate nuclear power at room temperatures, has proven to be a highly elusive feat. In fact, it is considered by many experts to be a mere pipe dream — a potentially unlimited source of clean energy that remains tantalizing, but so far unattainable.
However, a recently published academic paper from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (Spawar) in San Diego throws cold water on skeptics of cold fusion. Appearing in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, which counts Albert Einstein among its distinguished authors, the article claims that Spawar scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LERN) that can be replicated and verified by the scientific community."
Column Lie detectors figure prominently in the sauciest dramas, like espionage and murder, but they deeply polarize opinion. They pit pro-polygraph groups like the CIA, the Department of Energy and police forces against America's National Academy of Sciences, much of the FBI, and now the US Congressional Research Service. The agencies in favor of lie detectors keep their supporting data secret of obfuscated. The critics have marshaled much better arguments.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.